Doctor ‘astonished’ after seeing aunt’s name in JN Shoah memorial article

A retired doctor who lives in Finchley was “astonished” to see the name of his late aunt, in a picture of a Dutch memorial to Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Dr Joachim Frank spotted the picture in last week’s Jewish News. The Amsterdam memorial consists of a series of bricks to commemorate the 102,000 Dutch victims of the Nazis, each brick inscribed with a name, date of birth and their age when they died.

Betty Frank, who was just 25 when she was transported first to the Dutch camp of Westerbork and then to Sobibor, where she was murdered, was the youngest of three children, only one of whom, Dr Frank’s uncle, survived the Holocaust. She worked in the Jewish Hospital in Amsterdam as a secretary.

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Dr Frank himself, who was born in 1938, survived the war in hiding with his mother.

His father, Roelof, himself a doctor, served first in the Dutch army and then in the British forces, before dying in the far East when his ship was torpedoed by the Japanese in 1942.

Dr Frank said: “After the war my mother and I emigrated to South Africa, where I was educated. My grandparents never got over the deaths of two of their three children, it was a terrible blow.

“My uncle, who did survive, became a notary; I left South Africa for London and retired in 2010. It really came as a bolt from the blue to see my aunt’s name on the memorial”.