Daughter pens inspiring story of parents’ miracles
It wasn’t luck; ‘it was meant to be,’ says mother of adversity the couple faced
Asked by her daughter how it was possible to survive not one but 11 death camps and slave labour camps during the Second World War, Sonja Franken would say, “it was meant to be.”
How she faced down death in three gas chambers, when they ran out of Zyklon B or simply malfunctioned? It was meant to be.
How she ended up marrying a survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki? It was meant to be. It’s only fitting then that the book written about the late Sonja and John Franken by their daughter Roslyn should carry the same title.
Meant To Be: A True Story of Might, Miracles and Triumph of the Human Spirit tells the true story of Sonja and John’s incredible resilience to adversity on two separate continents before forging a new life together in Montreal.
John Franken, born in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), was drafted into the Dutch Naval Air Force.
When war broke out in Asia, he and his regiment headed to safety in Australia, but their ship was soon captured by the Japanese.
He was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp.
His three-and-a-half years in captivity would see him move from one camp to another, enduring near-starvation, beatings and dysentery before he ended up in Nagasaki.
But as luck — or fate — would have it, he was working in a coal mine, hundreds of metres underground, when an atomic bomb was dropped on the city Aug. 9, 1945.
Franken emerged unscathed by the destruction and unaffected by the radiation, which together would kill some 80,000 people.
Roslyn likes to say it was personal hygiene that saved her father’s life. He had volunteered to work in the coal mine because it would entitle him to a bath every day, instead of one bath every 10 days for slaves in the shipyards.
Meanwhile, halfway around the world in Amsterdam, Sonja Pagrach was 15 when she was captured by the Nazis.
She was separated from her parents, her two brothers and one of her sisters, all of whom were sent to their deaths at the Sobibor concentration camp.
She and two other sisters were sent first to a slave labour camp in Holland before eventually moving on to other camps and finally Auschwitz.
“Why my mother and two sisters were chosen, I don’t know,” Roslyn says. “She then faced death in gas chambers three different times. If it happens once, that’s random luck. Two times, it’s a coincidence. But three times? It was meant to be that she should survive. It’s uncanny.”
Miracles and coincidences aside, Roslyn wonders what it is that allowed some like her mother to survive while others did not.
“My mother told me that when someone gave up in their spirit, you could see it in their eyes and they would be dead in days. She said no way she would give up; she was determined to live. So how much of her survival was that determination or the luck of the draw? She would say it wasn’t luck, it was meant to be.”
After the war, John Franken, now trained in aircraft maintenance, got a job with Canadair and moved to Montreal. As Roslyn tells it, a mutual friend introduced him to Sonja through correspondence.
“Have I got a girl for you,” he said.
After her mother’s death, Roslyn unearthed the love letters the two wrote to each other over three months before deciding to meet.
John travelled to Amsterdam and brought Sonja back to Montreal to be his wife.
“Her family and friends thought she was crazy to leave (Holland) for a man she hardly knew,” Roslyn recounted.
“‘And do you know how cold it gets in Montreal?’ they asked her. She thought, ‘I’ll learn English and put on a coat.’ ”
Roslyn was born four years later. They lived in Côte-des-Neiges until Roslyn moved to Ottawa as an adult. Through that time, Sonja would face death again, this time at the age of 56 when she received a diagnosis of stomach cancer and was given two years to live.
“My mother told the doctors, ‘Look at this number on my arm. Hitler didn’t get me. Cancer won’t get me, either.’ ” Sonja died 22 years later. In the meantime, Roslyn also developed cancer at the age of 29 in the form of Hodgkin’s lymphoma and a tumour on her brain.
“The hardest part was telling my mother. Her reaction was to cry and look to God and say, ‘Give it to me. I can take it — not my little girl.’ ”
After nine months of chemotherapy, Roslyn has been cancerfree for 23 years.
Her father, meanwhile, went on to work at Air Canada for 27 years.
In his retirement, after surviving a massive heart attack, he gave talks in high schools about his wartime experience. His work was recognized by Queen Beatrix of Holland, who awarded him a medal of the Order of OrangeNassau for his efforts in raising awareness about the war.
And in 1991, John Franken organized the first of 21 annual demonstrations he would lead outside the Japanese embassy to demand that the Japanese government acknowledge and apologize for how it treated prisoners of war, the “comfort women” forced into sex slavery for the Japanese army, and the civilians who were interned.
His own mother died in an internment camp, Roslyn said.
Before he died in 2016 at the age of 94, he was the last Canadian survivor of the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki and the Japanese PoW camps.
Meant to Be: A True Story of Might, Miracles and Triumph of the Human Spirit, by Roslyn Franken, can be purchased on Amazon and at roslynfranken.com/buynow.html.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is Jan. 27.
My mother told me that when someone gave up in their spirit, you could see it in their eyes and they would be dead in days.