Holocaust Survivor and Coterie Resident Shares How She Escaped the Nazis and Built a New Life for Herself

But when they got off at the station, her parents handed her to a person she had never seen before and got back on the train without saying anything.

“I yelled and screamed and carried on, as you might imagine,” Rachel says. “But my parents left on that train, and I never saw them again.

Rachel was born in Belgium in December of 1936. She remembers her parents as being attentive and loving and recalls sleeping in their bed with them every night. But once the war started, she and her parents were constantly on the move, taking trains from one city to another to stay ahead of the Nazis.

“It was very dangerous and obviously very scary for me as a small child,” Rachel says. “I remember my mother sewing the yellow star onto my father’s jacket.”

“A big secret we had to keep”

Years later, she learned that the stranger her parents left her with was a member of an underground Christian organization started by teachers when they realized Jewish students were disappearing from their classrooms. The stranger took her to a convent in the village of Obourg, about two miles outside of Mons.

The nuns at the convent gave her a Catholic school uniform and a new, Christian name – Monique Simonis. They instructed her not to tell anyone her real name or her Jewish heritage.

“There were 17 of us Jewish girls in the convent pretending to be Christians during the war,” she says. “It was obviously a big secret we had to keep, but try telling a bunch of 5- and 6-year-olds to keep a secret like that. But somehow we were never discovered by the Nazis.”

She recalls the food and living conditions at the convent as being far from ideal. Some of the other girls had mothers who would visit and bring them food, but no one ever visited Rachel. There was also the strange experience of suddenly being raised in a Catholic environment.

Like her closest friend in the convent, an older girl named Anne, Rachel thought she might end up becoming a nun when she grew up. But when she told one of the nuns this, the nun rolled her eyes and said: “Monique, you will never be a nun.”

“I felt a certain freedom”

When the war ended, Rachel was sent to a Jewish orphanage. Later she would discover that her parents had both been murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

She was eventually found by members of her father’s side of the family who had survived the war. Her uncle happened to be married to an American woman, and arrangements were made for Rachel to travel with them to America on a merchant marine ship. Despite some initial tension between Rachel and her aunt – “She wasn’t excited about having to take care of me, and I was still in a mindset where I had to keep everything about me private and secretive,” she says – she eventually settled into a role as a caretaker for her aunt and uncle’s young children.

After graduating high school, Rachel attended Douglass College, which at the time was a women’s college connected to Rutgers University. It was there that she met her future husband, Bill, a WWII vet who had returned to Rutgers for grad school. Within six months of their first date, the two were married.

“Meeting and marrying Bill was a turning point for me,” Rachel says with a smile. “I felt a certain freedom I didn’t have before. It’s not that I ever forgot what happened to me or to my parents. But with Bill, I became more open to life and to the people around me.”

“Like being in paradise”

After finishing school, they moved to New York and had two children together.

“My life with Bill was everything I ever wanted,” Rachel says. “It was like being in paradise. And over the years, we had two children and five grandchildren. After losing my parents in such a horrible way at a young age, it really felt like I had managed to rebuild my family.”

Rachel remains very close with her children and grandchildren. She sometimes attends ballet performances with one of her granddaughters and plans to attend her oldest grandson’s wedding later this year. Her daughter still resides in New York, while her son lives in California with his family, including a son he adopted as an orphan from Ethiopia.

“It was very important to my son, knowing my background, that he offer a home and a family to another young person who had lost their parents,” Rachel says.

“Hugs”

When Rachel and Bill moved to Coterie Hudson Yards in the fall of 2024, she immediately noticed the attentiveness and care with which the staff welcomed them.

“For me, the staff is really what makes this place so wonderful,” Rachel says. “They’re all very kind and warm and impressive people. I love hearing about their lives, especially the young people with all their plans. They take great care of everyone here. You can really feel the love.”

Bill passed away in December of 2024. When the rabbi presiding over Bill’s funeral learned what had happened to Rachel’s parents, he found a way to include them in the ceremony.

“He said, ‘Rachel, you were never able to properly bury and mourn your parents, so we’re going to say a prayer for them now so they can lie here next to Bill,’” Rachel recalls. “And he asked me for their Hebrew names – I don’t know how I remembered those names, but I did – and he said the prayer and put his hands on the grave. And it was really very beautiful, to finally feel like they’d gotten a proper burial after all these years.”

In the wake of her husband’s passing, she’s grateful for the comfort and friendship she’s found in the Hudson Yards community.

“We were fortunate that Bill was able to die surrounded by family,” she says. “I remember his last word to me before he died. I went to kiss him, and he opened one eye and said: “hug.” That was our magic word. We always hugged, whether we were angry or happy or getting up in the morning or going to bed at night. And to hear him say that one last time was a gift.”

She encourages everyone to hug their friends and loved ones whenever they have the opportunity.

“A hug never made anyone’s day worse,” she said. “That’s part of why the Coterie community is so special to me. Whenever I run into someone on staff here, they really hug me. I love it.”