EVERETT — Some in Amsterdam watched helplessly as Nazis arrested their neighbors and hauled them away to concentration camps. Others were indifferent, peeping from doors of their homes.
Klaas and Roefina Post lived on a small farm in a northern Dutch village called Makkinga. They knew all was not right. Dutch Jews were being killed mercilessly. They couldn’t save everyone, but they knew they had to try.
The year was 1940, and spring had already started to give in to summer at a time when most of Europe was under Nazi aggression. Dutch forces had capitulated to the Nazis who prowled the streets of Amsterdam dressed in green uniforms and rounding up the country’s Jews.
Among the captured was 7-year-old Peter’ Metzelaar’s family.
The Nazis in 1942 seized Metzelaar’s family, except for him and his mother, Elli. Peter’s mother contacted the Dutch underground for help. They found the Posts. For the next two years the couple would shelter little Peter and his mother in a cave on their small farm.
“They were wonderful people who risked their lives for us,” said Metzelaar. He’s now 75 and lives in Seattle. “They were courageous and very humane people.”
Metzelaar will be telling his story at Everett Community College on Wednesday as a part of the college’s Surviving the Holocaust forums. The forums, now in their 12th year, are part of EvCC’s Humanities 150D class, “Surviving the Holocaust,” which includes written, filmed and personal accounts from eyewitnesses.
It was 67 years ago, but Metzelaar’s memories are vivid. “My entire family got murdered except my mother and me,” he said.
Two years had passed living with the Posts. Holland was still under Nazi occupation. They were coming to the farm with increasing frequency, searching for hidden Jews.
Metzelaar and his mother didn’t want to risk the Posts’ lives anymore. They moved to an apartment in The Hague where they lived with two women for eight to 10 months.
His mother learned that the women planned to report them to the Nazis. So mother and son fled back to Amsterdam, he said.
Getting there wasn’t easy. His mother had to disguise herself as a Red Cross nurse and travelled in a truck on a highway used only by the German military.
A Nazi SS officer stopped the truck.
“That is it. We will end up in gas chambers at Auschwitz,” Metzelaar thought, as his mother argued with the Nazi that she was a nurse and the small boy with her was an orphan she was taking to Amsterdam.
He couldn’t afford to lose his mother, as he had lost his father, aunts, uncles and grandparents. They managed to escape because his mother was born in Austria and spoke fluent German.
Metzelaar said he knew right from the beginning, when he went into hiding, that he was being hunted. “I knew I was one of … those people that they wanted to murder,” he said. “I was old enough … at the time to be afraid. I knew who the enemy was and my mother was the only security.”
Canadian forces liberated Holland in May 1945. Metzelaar moved with his mother to the United States in 1949 when he was 13. They lived in New York, then southern California. He moved to Seattle fifteen years ago.
Metzelaar has a regret: He went back to Amsterdam in 1992, but the Posts had died 10 years earlier. “I found the farm and the cave still intact,” he said.
In 2002, Metzelaar went to the Netherlands with his wife and met five generations of the Post family.
The names of Klaas and Roefina Post have been inscribed on the Wall of Honor in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. “Righteous Among the Nations” is a title given to a non-Jewish person who risked his or her life and freedom to rescue Jews from the Nazis.
Metzelaar gives 30 talks a year, telling his story in schools, universities, high schools, churches, synagogues and to any group that is interested in the history of World War II.
“I want to speak to younger people so that they can recognize the festering of hatred for no reason at all,” he said. “I try to emphasize that people need to think for themselves and not be sheep and follow orders the way millions of Germans did.”
More speakers at EvCC
EvCC has arranged speakers through the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center in Seattle. The events, open to the public, are from 12:20 to 1:50 p.m. in EvCC’s Whitehorse Hall, Room 105. Reservations are not needed.
April 27: Peter Metzelaar went into hiding with his mother when he was 7 years old. Nazis had killed the rest of his family.
May 11: Robert Herschkowitz was a child in Belgium when his parents escaped to France. He ended up in a concentration camp there, and eventually found refuge in Switzerland until the end of the war.
May 25: Leo Hymas was 19 when he liberated Buchenwald concentration camp as a U.S soldier while fighting in the battlefields of Europe.
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