Me, hobbies? Oh, yes! I have hobbies, but I can never do them because they're expensive. Oh, I love a lot of things. I like dancing. I always did that when I was younger. We danced and then I won some stockings. But, yeah, now I'm older. My gosh. And a little heavier. I do like reading. Sometimes I like movies, but not all movies. We just saw one in Hawaii, Pride and Prejudice. I have the book, and I loved it. Jane Austen was a good writer, and I have a lot of her books. Sense and Sensibility, too. Music: I love Strauss. Oh gosh. I have all of the music by Strauss. And I like to talk to people, I really do, and I can learn from other people, you know. Cooking: I do like cooking. I don't care for French food. I like Hungarian food, and that's like Goulash. And I'm not that great on Italian food either. I like more heavy food; you know, Belgium food, like potatoes, and gravy, and steak or something. Mostly now I cook Indonesian food, because I learned to cook Indonesian for Lud, my husband. So most of the time I cook rice, and chicken, and fish. You know what I mean?

My favorite places? I like Bali. That's in Indonesia. Australia, New Zealand is pretty. London I don't care for, I don't know. Belgium, there are some pretty nice places to go. I like Switzerland. Austria is my favorite. That was beautiful. It was not a good time for me, but it had nothing to do with the country, you know. America--America is really the best, because we have it all. We have the mountains, oceans, everything. You don't have to go anywhere other than America. You go around America, you see it all. I like mountains the most. I don't care for the ocean so much. I don't know why. Maybe I'm scared of the big water or something. I love Hawaii, but I don't care for the water.

What would you say are your goals in life? Well, I'd like to finish my schooling. The schools all closed during the German occupation. After the war, I wanted to finish my school real bad. So I tried in Belgium, and I tried in America. Well, the reading was okay for me. Writing is still not that good. What happened is, you have to spell, and I could not spell. The teacher said it was something to do with my speaking, because I speak too many languages, and I get confused. I can write my name and so, but when I have to write a letter, in English or in Dutch, I make a lot of mistakes, and I go over from English to Dutch and from Dutch to English. You know, even when I talk on the phone, people catch me doing that, and they say, "Rach, you talk Dutch to me." And I say, "Oo, I'm sorry." You know, like "pork chops." Well, a lot of times I cannot pronounce it. I think, "What the hell is it again?" And then I say it in Dutch. Well, my two daughters-in-law know me, so they say, "Mom, it's pork chops!" So I say, "Oh, pork chops." But sometimes I cannot remember it. Isn't that funny? And then I tell them, "What are those big things again?" And then they crack up. Now I can say it for you, I don't know why. Tell me why you decided to write this book.

My neighbors and my family said, "Mom, you should tell your story." You know? I told them, "What is so special about it?" "Well," they said to me, "the way you talked about your parents, about the camp." I said, "Well, other people went through the same thing." But I was scared because I thought when I tell my story in a stupid book like that everybody's going to know my life. It was sad, really, when you really see what it was like. Sometimes I think, "What a lousy life." But, in the meantime I was blessed, too. Whatever I did, I was blessed by the Lord.

How did you put the book together?

We knew Daniel for a long time, and we found out he wrote books or something, so I talked with him about it. And he accepted it, to try it, because he told me he was not used to biographies. But I thought, "Well, I can trust him the most, because I knew his mom and I knew his dad, and they were always, always nice to us." So I thought, "Well, let me try him." So I think we met every Thursday, and we met with the tape and taped everything. But he asked the questions, you know.

You spent three years approximately putting this book together. How was that experience for you?

That was a long, long thing. It was hard on me, yeah. Frustrating. And sometimes when it was him and me talking, some of these things came up again. Because I put it away. In Belgium I was alone. I couldn't go to the family. My grandmother, she was gone. The only two people I went to was Charles, my doctor, and Gerard Vander Putten, who helped me with jobs. But otherwise nobody helped me because of the situation with the war. See, nobody wanted anything to do with the daughter of an SS. So I was lonesome. Really lonesome. And I had to survive, so I took any job, whatever was available, you know. But you cannot dwell on these things, because, my God, it kills you. And going back over it for the book I felt the pain, and then I would cry. I thought, "You know, I'm blessed. I went through it and the Lord helped me." But otherwise I could not have made it, because it was a horrible, horrible time for me. When you really understand that, and what Belgium went through, it was a painful situation. When we were working on the book, sometimes I would see things, or I read stories from other people, and I thought, "Oh yeah, that was me, too." I was not the only one who went through hell in my life. They sometimes went a different way: they went doping, and they went smoking, and they went drinking. I never did that. I think in the book there are a lot of lessons to be learned by other generations and younger generations.