Lost in the Fog: Memoir of a Bastard

A Belgian Recalls the War, the Nazis, Her Fractured Life

Rachel Van Meers, Daniel Chase

• Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781613733905
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The courageous story of Van Meers, born in a home for unwed mothers in Ghent, Belgium, 1930. It is told in her own words in a frank, humorous and down-to-earth manner. She grew up as a "bastard" during the Great Depression, and sees her family and country told apart by prejudice and politics in World War II, and recounts how she struggles to redefine herself in turbulent postwar Europe. Based on hundreds of hours of taped interviews, Rachel's view of a family "not-quite-normal, " her amazing strength in the face of abusive and degrading treatment, and her strong faith and upbeat attitude make her story a joy and inspiration to read.

CHAPTER ONE

YOU’RE NAILS IN MY COFFIN

WE DIDN’T HAVE MUCH, BELIEVE ME. I HAVE A PICTURE OF ME as a little girl standing in the backyard with my mother, and I’m holding a big round-faced doll. I said, “Where the hell did that doll come from?” I never had a doll in my life. Not even a teddy bear. I think my aunts borrowed it for the picture.

I was born in a home for unwed mothers in the city of Ghent, Belgium, 1930. From what I understand, my mother, Helene, a beautiful young woman of nineteen with almond-colored hair, went to a dance, met somebody on the dance floor, they fooled around, and she got pregnant. In court the guy showed up with his wife and denied that he was the one. So my mother lost, and he went his way.

After I was born, we moved into my grandparents’ house in the little Ghent borough of Mariakerke. It was part of a long wall of grayish brick houses next to the canal. When you opened the door, you entered into a little hallway. Past the living room was the salon, where in the evening we played cards, dominoes, or chess for candy, and then a kitchen in the back where we sat around the table and talked and ate next to the coal stove. Upstairs were two rooms, then up more stairs there were one or two rooms. And every house was built the same way.

As a young child, I was always with my grandmother or my grandfather while my mother worked at the weaving mill. I remember standing on a chair and watching horses towing the fat barges down the canal that ran along the cobblestone streets. Once in awhile I went out when my grandmother went shopping, but mostly in the street or not far away.

My mother worked the whole week, then my grandmother took her pay for food. My mother liked to sing and go dancing. On weekends, everybody took a bath and went out. Everybody, except my mother.

My grandmother always had something to say. “You work the whole week, you take care of the kid!” So then my mother rolled my hair and bathed me, and I yelled because it hurt. Then it went around in a circle, my grandmother “poof!” hit my mother, then my mother hit me.

“You should have never been born! You’re nails in my coffin!” she said.

I thought, “Oh my God.” I was so scared.

On my birthday she brought me a cake and told me, “That’s for the nail in my coffin.”

So I didn’t like that cake too much. But I said, “Thank you, Mother,” and I took the cake.

My mother hated my grandmother. My grandmother, Charlotte, was small and stout. I liked her like that. It made her comfortable to me. She always wore a long dress and nice shoes. She had long beautiful black hair, and inside was silvery gray. She was a real strict Catholic, so when my mother and I moved in with them, we were taboo to her.

My grandmother was always praying. She had a big beautiful chair and next to her were all her books. I had a little footstool where I sat by her or I lay on her lap.

She said to me all the time, “There is a right way and there is a wrong way, and you have to figure out what is wrong and what is right.”

In the back she cooked. Mornings we ate a muffin and cheese. She made stumpot in the afternoon, a mix of mash potatoes and vegetables with onions, and then put it on toast, and everybody came in to eat. Sometimes she made her own soup, and we ate that with a slice of raisin bread with butter and tea, except on Fridays when we had fish. We didn’t have much meat, and the chicken and eggs were expensive. I always liked to lick the pans when she was cooking. When she cooked the milk, I would see that she wasn’t looking and steal the top layer of skin with my finger and eat it. She saw me do it, but I didn’t know. I was just dumb, you know. She said, “Did you take the skin out of the milk?”

“Nooo,” I said.

Then she said to me, “Let me see your forehead!” So I went over to her. I thought she was going to hit me or something. Then she looked at my forehead and said, “You lied to me, because there’s a big cross on there!” My grandmother came up with some doozies. She told me, “You know, when you do something just tell the truth, don’t lie about it.”

I was always scared to death. I said, “Yes, yes, Moo Moo.” So I never lied.

When a Catholic funeral went by on horses, you would see a cross on this coffin. Then you had to stop and make a cross, my grandmother said. One time there was a funeral carriage passing by. She stopped, but she didn’t make a cross.

I asked her, “Why didn’t you make a cross?”

She said, “He doesn’t have the cross of Jesus. That means, he goes to hell.”

As a child I thought, “My goodness, you go to hell when you don’t have a cross on your coffin?”

She was always sitting next to me reading her Missal. She went to Maria, Joseph, the Holy this and the Holy that, but she never went to Jesus or God. On Friday or Saturday my grandmother would go to the church to the guy in the box there. What the hell she did, I don’t know, but she went in so often I thought, “She has to be a bad woman!” She had to do five of these and five of these, and I had to sit there waiting until the crucifixion was over, you know.

My grandmother was a funny lady. She hated doctors. She made all the medicine herself. She grew everything in the yard. She said, “Drink it! Eat it!” She had a golden snuffbox with her name on it, and she opened it and sniffed all the time, and I hated it.

I asked her, “Why do you do that?”

“Come here!” she said to me. Then she put my nose in the snuffbox, and I sneezed and sneezed. She was something else.

My cousins, none of them liked her. They called her a witch, because she knew everything. I don’t know how she knew it, and I didn’t care.

The last few weeks in August we had beautiful weather. That’s the only two months you see the sun, believe me. The rest was horrible ice and fog. In the summer we sat outside, and the neighbors waved to us. Every move you made, they knew. Everything you said, they knew. And they came back to my grandmother and said, “Do you know what that bastard Rachel did?”

Oh, they loved that. But that was the only entertainment they got. Some of them had a radio, but that was a luxury. The rest was always, “he said so, and she said so, his wife had a baby, his wife died, he’s got a cold and he didn’t come to work,” stupid lousy things that we don’t even think about now. But then that was important. News just traveled through the streets from mouth to mouth. And they lied, you know. “He is sneaking out on his wife and his wife don’t know,” and it goes on like that over and over. Then in the evening before you sat down at the table, my grandmother said, “Oh! Don’t sit down! I have to talk to you first!” Then you have to listen to her stories.

“So-and-so said that you said this and that!”

“I didn’t say that!”

“Yes you did!” And whatever they said, she liked it, and that was it. You could say no till kingdom come, but she still believed what they said.

My grandmother was strict with me, but I loved her. She taught me to crochet the curtains, knit, and mend socks.

My grandfather was different. He was tall and slender, had a mustache, and was always puffing on a pipe. I loved my grandfather dearly. Wherever he was, I was like a dog following him around. When my mother and grandmother started in, my grandfather winked at me and got me out of the house. He had a big garden of vegetables, beans, tomatoes, and carrots, and he said, “Pick some beans.” Or he sent me out in the front, and he asked me, “Do you want money?”

I said, “Yeah!” Then I could buy some chocolate.

In my time the milkman came with a horse, and the vegetable guy came with a horse. So my grandfather said to me, “Okay, pick all the horse shit up, then I give you a franc.”

I would do anything for chocolate.

My mother and my grandfather were fantastic together. The Flemish side was more to the German’s way of thinking. They talked, they joked, and they sang. Yeah, they sang a lot, but not nice songs. Dirty songs about the nuns.

What I learned from my mother was not too many good things, I tell you that. When I was sitting down, she always thought of something else for me to do just to make me disappear. She might not love me, but I loved her. I don’t know why. Because I was her daughter, I guess.

CHAPTER TWO

SNOW WHITE, CINDERELLA, AND ME

I’M GOING TO TELL YOU A STRANGE STORY. IN THE HALLWAY that led through to the kitchen was a big old-fashioned mirror, like the one in Snow White. My grandmother always told me, “When you look in the mirror, that means you are vain.” When I was little I used to stand on a big chair in front of the mirror and do my hair and make faces. But one time I was standing alone in the hallway when suddenly, from behind, something slapped me hard. At first I thought it was my grandmother. I cried in pain and turned around. The hall was empty. Behind me was the kitchen. I would’ve seen something in the mirror’s reflection if someone had been there. But there was nothing. To this day, I never knew who did that. Boy, was I scared. I always thought that evil was in the mirror. And I never looked in a dumb mirror again.

I didn’t have any friends, except my cousin, Nathalie. Nathalie lived on the same street and we were always together. She was roly-poly, blonde with dark eyes like her father. She read a lot and sang with her mother all the old German songs. She was scared of my grandmother. Nobody liked my grandmother.

Snow White came in 1938. I couldn’t go to movies, because we didn’t have the money. So Nathalie cried by her father, “Oh, I want Rachel with me! I want Rachel with me!”

My uncle Edmond said, “Hey, that’s expensive.”

Nathalie said, “Take it out of my piggy bank!” So they did. For the first time in my life I saw a real movie about Snow White. I cried the whole time. I wanted so badly to be her. And everybody called me Snow White after that.

My other cousin, Florence, was three years older than Nathalie. Florence was okay with me when the parents weren’t around. One time, the whole family was together. Me, Nathalie, and Florence were never allowed to stay with the family when they were talking. So we went upstairs.

Nathalie said, “Rachel, it’s cold!”

It was cold. I said, “What we going to do? We don’t have blankets, they’re talking, and we can’t go back downstairs.”

Then I saw all the Piccolos. My mother was crazy about Piccolos. Piccolos was a magazine from America. It had pictures of all the movie stars, models, and stories from New York and Hollywood, big things. My mother got a bunch of them. She kept them in a big stack upstairs.

I said, “I know what we’re going to do. She’s already read those.” So I ripped them up and we made a big fire.

I didn’t like to lie, so when they asked, “Who did that?” I said, “Well, I did.”

Oh my goodness. My mother was after me with a big stick she did the laundry with. I couldn’t sit for a week. But I didn’t care. I was cold.

My grandmother had six children, three boys and three girls. Fredric was the oldest. After him came Edmond, my mother, Michiel, Jenny, and then Sofie, the youngest.

Edmond, Nathalie’s father, was always a happy person. He was in his early thirties, had black hair and smoked smelly expensive cigarettes. But he was neat, dressed in beautiful pants, shirts, and always a necktie. He sang good with my mother, and wherever he went, he whistled. Even on the bicycle I heard his whistle so I knew he was coming. He had a tandem for two and he and my aunt went to the coast and back. He liked to ride around with her. He was a painter; inside, mostly doors and walls. They had beautiful fireplaces and he painted these to look like marble. They had money and a beautiful house. My aunt Sarah was from a real rich family that owned a factory for coal. She kept her house as clean as a whistle. Maybe once in a month they went to a movie, but most of the time they stayed at home.

Edmond talked to me, but never touched me. Every spring he called me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. You’re Nails in My Coffin
• 2. Snow White, Cinderella, and Me
• 3. Is It like Heaven?
• 4. Let the One Who Has Sin Work
• 5. I Do this So You Can Have a Name
• 6. Geoffrey Voorst
• 7. When I Have to Die, I’ll Die Here in My Bed
• 8. You’re Going to Make It through, But Not with Me
• 9. What about Her? What about My Mother?
• 10. I Don’t Think I’ll See You Back in a Month
• 11. What the Hell is Going to Happen to Me Here?
• 12. I Wish You Wasn’t Here
• 13. The Lullaby is over
• 14. It’s Your Flag. It’s Not Mine
• 15. That’s the Way People Die
• 16. I Do Care about Tomorrow
• 17. If You Ever Talk about this, That’s It for You
• 18. That’s Not the End. The Worst is Yet to Come
• 19. You Have to Live with It
• 20. I Need Those Stockings
• 21. Who the Hell is the Criminal Here? Him or Me?
• 22. I Want to Stand on My Own Feet, and I Will
• 23. What the Hell Happened Now?
• 24. It Was Nice Seeing You
• 25. It’s Time to Get Out of Here
• 26. Whatever You Want, I’ll Do for You
• 27. We’re Not Talking about That
• 28. That is Not My Life
• 29. You Are and Will Be Her Child
• 30. I Hate People Lying to Me
• 31. You Know the Family
• 32. Nobody Knows But Me
• 33. What the Hell is He Whistling at Me for?
• 34. What the Hell Am I Going to Do with That Kid?
• 35. I’m Not Going to Give Up On You, That’s for Sure
• 36. Where’s Your Husband?
• 37. I’m Not Going Back to Indonesia
• 38. He Don’t Want You
• 39. I Lost Everything
• 40. Four Miracles
• 41. I Can’t Speak English, But I’m Going to America
• 42. It’s a Blessing
• Photos