The Mastmakers' Daughters

The Mastmakers' Daughters are cousins. They have the same name: Rennie de Vries. Our main character grows up above her father's mastmaker shop in a small seaport on the Zuiderzee. Her three year younger cousin grows up in Germany where her father started a mastmaker business. Rennie joins Hitler's Nazi party. Our Rennie ends up in the 2nd World War Resistance. The young mother is arrested by the Germans. The story follows her through Dutch prisons and concentration camps Vught and Ravensbrück until the interception by the American 7th Army on her Death March out of Dachau. The author managed to reconstruct one of the first complete accounts of the 200 Dutch women of the "AGFA-Commando". .www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agfa-Commando. These courageous women stood united to survive the horror. They prayed, sang, cried and laughed together. Rennie remembers their secret religious exercises with Corrie and Betsie ten Boom. Van Ommen discovered a number of misconceptions and some shocking facts about the heroes and villains in the Resistance. The book also follows the Nazi Rennie after she flees Holland when the Third Reich begins to collapse. Rennie's husband kept a diary from the time of his arrest until Rennie's safe return. He received one of the first issues of the "Diary of Anne Frank" from Otto Frank. The first part is based on Rennie's memoirs. It is a very personal account of her experiences in a small seaport, when the fishing and commercial fleet moved by sail and muscle, before running water and electricity. Rennie embraces the emancipation and is one of the founding members of the Dutch equivalent of our YWCA. Most of all, this is Rennie's affirmation of her gratitude to be a child of God.

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