MEANT TO BE

A woman meditates on her parents’ struggles to survive Auschwitz and the atom bomb in Franken’s family memoir.

The author, a personal development coach, recaps her parents’ horrific experiences during World War II and the grit and seemingly miraculous twists of fate that saved them. Her father, John, a Dutch-Indonesian Jew raised in Java, was captured by Japanese forces in 1941 and interned in Nagasaki, where he endured starvation, savage punishments, and bitter cold. He survived by his wits and several lucky turns—he narrowly escaped from an outhouse just before it was hit by a Japanese bomb—and was transferred from Nagasaki to a coal mine 10 miles away shortly before the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on the city. Franken’s mother, Sonja, grew up in a Jewish family in the Netherlands and was shipped by the Nazis to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, where she was made a slave laborer. When she was sent to the gas chamber, her life was spared because the guards had run out of gas. Later chapters cover John and Sonja’s courtship and married life in Canada, Sonja’s battle with cancer (which lasted 21 years, even though doctors initially gave her only two years to live), and the author’s own bout with lymphoma at the age of 29, which she weathered by drawing on her parents’ example of fortitude and heroism. Repeating the line “meant to be,” Franken discerns benign cosmic intent in the darkest of circumstances. She conveys the suffering her parents endured and witnessed in plangent, evocative prose (“He could only make out a few streets and remnants of concrete buildings,” she writes of Johns recollections of Nagasaki’s ruins; “[t]he burning smell still lingered and it seemed that the shadows of the dead were everywhere”) while finding perspective with touches of mordant humor (“After losing my hair to cancer, I decided that I would never complain about a bad hair day again”). The result is a harrowing but ultimately inspiring saga of endurance and hope.

A daughter’s moving tribute to her parents, full of heartbreak that leads to uplift.