Rachel Zipora Dror (née Lewin; Hebrew: רחל ציפורה דרור; 19 January 1921 – 14 December 2024) was a German Jewish teacher and Holocaust survivor.
After returning from Israel to live in West Germany (for health reasons) in 1957, and more intensively since her retirement from teaching in 1986, she has come to wider prominence because of her engagement for Christian-Jewish-Islamic co-existence, and as an advocate for religious openness and mutual tolerance.
[4] Rachel would later look back on an idyllic childhood, prematurely ended when the Hitler government took power in January 1933 and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship.
After March 1933, when Rachel was still aged only twelve, a slightly older boy who had become a friend (and admirer) was no longer permitted to come to the house.
She joined a Zionist youth group: between May 1936 and November 1938 she lived in Hamburg where the focus of her life was on preparing for emigration to Palestine, which since 1920 had been administered, for most purposes, as though a component territory of the British Empire.
[4][2] Hamburg was an economically dynamic city with a long mercantile tradition which over the years had made it more open to ethnic and cultural diversity more cosmopolitan than Königsberg in the east.
So, initially, she found it, a reassuring sense of belonging being strengthened by the fact that she was one of a group of 27 young people all staying at the same Hamburg address at one end of the "Klosterallee" (street) and all preparing actively for emigration to Palestine.
[4] On 28 October 1938, a member of the group called Wolfgang Drechsler, whom one source describes as Rachel Lewin's boyfriend, was arrested and swiftly deported.
[7] The experience led Rachel Lewin to quit the "Klosterallee" group and move in with her mother's elder sister, Flora Rosenbaum, who taught at the Talmud Tora School in Hamburg's Grindel district.
Unsure what was going on, she pushed her way through the crowd gathering at the newsstand on which newspapers were piled up, showing photographs of the overnight campaign of arson, looting and bloodshed.
The news vendor, whom till now had always seemed a friendly soul, spotted her, and giving a fair rendering of the Berlin dialect snarled, "So, little Jew, do you too want to see how your synagogues burned?
[8] On 29 April 1939 the last legally sanctioned ship destined for "British" Palestine (till after the war broke out five months later) set sail for Haifa from Trieste.
Shortly after the birth of her daughter in 1952 Rachel Dror and her husband took a walk in downtown Haifa, intending to enjoy a night out.
The strange woman recognised Rachel from a photograph that Hugo Lewin had kept in his pocket, and insisted on showing as many people as he could, while being taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
[11] By 1944 Italy was no longer militarily engaged as a German ally, and the Germany army, having asserted military control over the country, was fighting a grim rear-guard action in the context of civil war and an Anglo-American offensive from the south.
[1][11] Here their train was met by the camp doctor Josef Mengele who identified and separated out those deemed fit for work from those whom he thought unfit.
For many years after the 1945 collapse of the Hitler nightmare, and even after returning to live in Germany in 1957, the suffering that the Holocaust had brought to her family was one topic that this otherwise garrulous special needs teacher had no wish to discuss in public.
[17] That year, while attending a regional teachers' conference, she fell into conversation with Edgar Winckler who was an executive board member of the Stuttgart Society for Christian-Jewish collaboration ("...Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit" / CJZ).
After discovering that, in a former life, Rachel Dror had worked as a policewoman in northern Israel, he commented that the CJZ board needed a woman.
Heinz Lauber was a senior government official ("Leitender Regierungsdirektor")[18] As they talked, he mentioned that he thought she should visit schools in the area in order to tell the children about her personal experiences of National Socialism in Germany.
That evening a colleague who was aware of Lauber's suggestion called her and asked how she would feel about addressing 300 young people on the subject of her story, that of her parents and that of her brother.
Some days later, she delivered a three-hour talk to a large group of older school children while they sat and listened in complete silence.