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Holocaust speaker recounts story of survival
November 28, 2007
The year is 1944, and nine-year-old Peter Metzelaar is standing beside a muddy road 45 miles outside of Amsterdam. As he watches his mother, dressed as a Red Cross nurse, argue with the Nazi SS officer, one thought keeps drumming though his head: This is it. The hiding is over. Soon, we’re going to be dead.
The arrogant Nazi is going to see through my mother’s disguise, and all the hiding, starving and running over the last four years will be for nothing, he thought. He assumed he and his mother would be rounded up, just like his father, aunts, uncles and grandparents, and face the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
The two were on the road that fateful morning because his mother, Elli, had discovered that the two women hiding them were planning to betray them to the Nazis. So his mother had contacted the Dutch underground and then spent all night sewing up a mock nurse’s uniform from bed sheets. Not daring to wait until dawn, the pair made their way through back yards and alleys to the main highway.
They finally made it to the road leading to Amsterdam, where another safe house awaited 45 miles away. The question was, how to get there?
Peter Metzelaar, 72, recounted his harrowing story during the first Powell and Heller Family Conference in Support of Holocaust Education held in the Scan Center in early November. The face off between his mother and that Nazi officer actually began four years earlier when the Nazi’s starting rounding up Jews in Amsterdam, said Metzelaar, who is part of a Holocaust survivors speaker’s bureau based in Seattle.
Metzelaar was five years old when the Nazis marched into Holland, all dressed in green uniforms and carrying fixed bayonets.
Everyone he knew had to wear a strange yellow star on their chest with the world “Jood” on it, Jew in Dutch. The Nazis started arriving at neighborhood doors, always after midnight and always in large metal trucks. The doors would slam open and a fresh-faced soldier would bark, “All Jews get out.” In the morning, Metzelaar, now seven, would find a few more desks empty at school.
In the end, 20 friends were gone, his aunts, uncles, both grandparents. Finally, his dad didn’t come home from work.
“Mom recognized quickly our number was coming up,” Metzelaar told the conference attendees. She contacted the underground, and they were sent to a small farm in the northeast part of Holland.
The couple, Klaas and Roefina Post, didn’t have much, but what they did have “they shared with two total and complete strangers.” They also took precautions, building a hideaway in a cave in the forest and digging out a small hiding place beneath the farmhouse’s floorboards. Metzelaar remembers that on one raid he could see the boots of Nazi soldiers just inches above his nose.
“One caught, one sneeze, it would have been all over,” he said.
After two years, the raids by the Nazis were so frequent that his mother decided she couldn’t risk the lives of the elderly couple anymore. She took her son and went to Hague, to a room two women offered up, where he was issued false papers and went to Christian school.
Instead of baseball cards, boys in Metzelaar’s class would collect strange scraps of metal that fell down from the dogfights between German fighters and British planes. One winter Metzelaar picked up a big piece of metal, and balancing it on his thick red gloves, showed it to his mom. She took one look at it and slapped it out of his hands. The bomb exploded 15 feet away and left a crater six feet deep.
In 1944, when Elli and her son were on that muddy road, she passed him off as an orphan she’d found after a bomb raid. The Nazi bought it and the pair road the 45 miles to Amsterdam sandwiched between two SS officers.
In 1949, the pair immigrated to the United States. His mother remarried. She refused to discuss what happened to them during the war, so their story of survival was almost lost.
Then in 1993, while on a trip to Brussels to see his son, Metzelaar set about to find the couple from the farmhouse. The couple was dead, but he did find their daughter, Lena. He also discovered that his father, Simon, had been shipped to Auschwitz on Aug 2, 1942 and died two weeks later. The Red Cross document even had the time when he walked into the gas chambers: August 18 at 2:30 p.m.
When Metzelaar returned, his mother didn’t want to hear any of the story. She died in 1994.
Now, Metzelaar will tell the story to whoever will listen, especially to students in the schools where he often speaks.
He shows them a yellow star his mother had kept for some in inexplicable reason, found 20 years ago in some wadded up paper. He shows them pictures of the Posts and his old grade school book from that Christian school. He shows them family photographs taken before the war.
Some middle school students have referred to him as the “Holocaust dude,” while others ask what the Holocaust was in the first place– a scary question for him. Yet, he continues to tell his personal story, to honor the Posts, his mother and those that did not survive.
University Communications staff writer Barbara Clements compiled this report. Comments, questions, ideas? Please contact her at ext. 7427 or at clemenba@plu.edu. Photo by University Photographer Jordan Hartman.
The two were on the road that fateful morning because his mother, Elli, had discovered that the two women hiding them were planning to betray them to the Nazis. So his mother had contacted the Dutch underground and then spent all night sewing up a mock nurse’s uniform from bed sheets. Not daring to wait until dawn, the pair made their way through back yards and alleys to the main highway.
Peter Metzelaar Podcast
They finally made it to the road leading to Amsterdam, where another safe house awaited 45 miles away. The question was, how to get there?
Peter Metzelaar, 72, recounted his harrowing story during the first Powell and Heller Family Conference in Support of Holocaust Education held in the Scan Center in early November. The face off between his mother and that Nazi officer actually began four years earlier when the Nazi’s starting rounding up Jews in Amsterdam, said Metzelaar, who is part of a Holocaust survivors speaker’s bureau based in Seattle.
Metzelaar was five years old when the Nazis marched into Holland, all dressed in green uniforms and carrying fixed bayonets.
Everyone he knew had to wear a strange yellow star on their chest with the world “Jood” on it, Jew in Dutch. The Nazis started arriving at neighborhood doors, always after midnight and always in large metal trucks. The doors would slam open and a fresh-faced soldier would bark, “All Jews get out.” In the morning, Metzelaar, now seven, would find a few more desks empty at school.
In the end, 20 friends were gone, his aunts, uncles, both grandparents. Finally, his dad didn’t come home from work.
“Mom recognized quickly our number was coming up,” Metzelaar told the conference attendees. She contacted the underground, and they were sent to a small farm in the northeast part of Holland.
The couple, Klaas and Roefina Post, didn’t have much, but what they did have “they shared with two total and complete strangers.” They also took precautions, building a hideaway in a cave in the forest and digging out a small hiding place beneath the farmhouse’s floorboards. Metzelaar remembers that on one raid he could see the boots of Nazi soldiers just inches above his nose.
“One caught, one sneeze, it would have been all over,” he said.
After two years, the raids by the Nazis were so frequent that his mother decided she couldn’t risk the lives of the elderly couple anymore. She took her son and went to Hague, to a room two women offered up, where he was issued false papers and went to Christian school.
Instead of baseball cards, boys in Metzelaar’s class would collect strange scraps of metal that fell down from the dogfights between German fighters and British planes. One winter Metzelaar picked up a big piece of metal, and balancing it on his thick red gloves, showed it to his mom. She took one look at it and slapped it out of his hands. The bomb exploded 15 feet away and left a crater six feet deep.
In 1944, when Elli and her son were on that muddy road, she passed him off as an orphan she’d found after a bomb raid. The Nazi bought it and the pair road the 45 miles to Amsterdam sandwiched between two SS officers.
In 1949, the pair immigrated to the United States. His mother remarried. She refused to discuss what happened to them during the war, so their story of survival was almost lost.
Then in 1993, while on a trip to Brussels to see his son, Metzelaar set about to find the couple from the farmhouse. The couple was dead, but he did find their daughter, Lena. He also discovered that his father, Simon, had been shipped to Auschwitz on Aug 2, 1942 and died two weeks later. The Red Cross document even had the time when he walked into the gas chambers: August 18 at 2:30 p.m.
When Metzelaar returned, his mother didn’t want to hear any of the story. She died in 1994.
Now, Metzelaar will tell the story to whoever will listen, especially to students in the schools where he often speaks.
He shows them a yellow star his mother had kept for some in inexplicable reason, found 20 years ago in some wadded up paper. He shows them pictures of the Posts and his old grade school book from that Christian school. He shows them family photographs taken before the war.
Some middle school students have referred to him as the “Holocaust dude,” while others ask what the Holocaust was in the first place– a scary question for him. Yet, he continues to tell his personal story, to honor the Posts, his mother and those that did not survive.
University Communications staff writer Barbara Clements compiled this report. Comments, questions, ideas? Please contact her at ext. 7427 or at clemenba@plu.edu. Photo by University Photographer Jordan Hartman.