Academy Chicago to Publish Oral History of Belgium in WWII

Lost in the Fog
Memoir of a Bastard

By Rachel Van Meers as told to Daniel Chase

In 1943, shortly after her 13th birthday, Rachel Van Meers stood on a railway platform in German occupied Belgium waiting for a train that would take her and twenty other girls to a “State Camp for Rehabilitation and Labor” in Wertach, Germany.

I remember my Grandmother wore a black shawl. She told me, “I don’t think I’ll see you back in a month. You never know with the Germans. It can take you two weeks. It can take you three weeks. It can take maybe a year.”

Lost in the Fog is the courageous story of Van Meers, born in a home for unwed mothers in the city of Ghent, Belgium in 1930. Raised in a Flemish working-class district by her strict grandmother, two aunts, and three uncles, Van Meers recounts her struggles growing up “a bastard” in Belgium during the Great Depression. When the war breaks out, Belgium, abandoned by its king, was quickly swallowed up by Germany, and the people were left to fend for themselves against the overwhelming occupying forces, and shattering Allied air strikes. Van Meers was torn between her family’s continuing allegiance to Belgium and her mother, a radical social outcast, who became alienated from the family after she joined the S.S. When a violent argument erupts between Van Meers and her Nazi-sympathizing stepfather, she was sent to a child labor camp in Germany and later returned to witness Belgium turned on its head after the war. Now a strong spirited young woman, she refused to go the way of her mother, or give in to the brutal attacks of her ex-Nazi stepfather. She was eventually able to sustain her independence from her family and emigrate to America in 1961.

This is a rare and personal look at Belgium during one of its most significant periods of history. Van Meers tells her story in plain language with humor and honesty, and is based on hundreds of hours of taped interviews with Daniel Chase, a writer based in Oregon. Van Meers’s unique view of “a family not quite normal” in extraordinary times, her strong faith and refusal to back down in spite of abusive and degrading treatment, being labeled as a bastard at a time when this amounted to complete societal isolation, and her upbeat attitude and singular forms of expression are a joy and inspiration to read.

Rachel Van Meers achieved many milestones in her life. She’s been a maid, a hat check girl, an electronics assembler, and an assistant apartment manager in Belgium, Amsterdam, and in the United States. Now retired, she resides in Oregon and is the matriarch of her family. This is her first book.

Daniel Chase is a freelance writer and editor living in Oregon. He spent most of his youth writing stories with his sister. This is his first book.