Holocaust survivor shares childhood account with middle-schoolers

Pete Metzelaar was 7 when he went into hiding.

The Nazis had come first for his aunt and uncle, then for his grandparents and then for his father – an avid fisherman, who kept a rowboat on Amsterdam’s canals in defiance of German laws prohibiting Jews from owning boats.

After his father’s 1942 arrest, a farm couple in the Dutch resistance hid Metzelaar and his mother. German soldiers searched the farm repeatedly, but they didn’t find the terrified boy and woman huddled beneath the farmhouse’s floorboards.

“We could hardly breathe in the crawl space,” said Metzelaar, who spoke Tuesday at Lakeland Junior High in Rathdrum. “Soldiers were walking 1 1/2 feet over our heads. One cough and it would have been all over.”

Metzelaar, 79, is part of the speaker’s bureau at the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle. The retired radiology technician makes four to five appearances per month, describing his experience as a Jewish child in the Netherlands during World War II. By talking about the horrors of genocide, Metzelaar said, he works to promote “the necessity of tolerance … and independent thought.”

His stories riveted a gymnasium full of eighth-graders.

“This is probably the last generation that will hear firsthand accounts from Holocaust survivors,” said Jennifer Emory, a history teacher at Timberlake Junior High.

All of the Lakeland School District’s eighth-graders read “The Diary of Anne Frank” and discuss its relevance to current world conflicts, she said.

Metzelaar encouraged students to put themselves in his place. “Imagine being 6 years old and having to wear a star with the word Jood on it,” he said, referring to the Dutch word for Jew. “Think about how that would feel.”

Metzelaar’s early war memories are of German soldiers harassing Jewish citizens for identification papers, which they were required to carry at all times. Then came the nighttime raids in his neighborhood, when soldiers pounded on doors and yelled, “All you Jews get out!”

His mom struggled to explain why family members and friends were suddenly missing. With their own arrest imminent, an underground contact helped her find the farm couple willing to shelter them.

“They were so courageous, not to mention kind and generous,” Metzelaar said.

They risked their lives to hide Metzelaar and his mother, and shared their limited food supplies. The farmer sang to Metzelaar at night, helping make up for his missing father.

As the soldiers’ searches of the farm increased, the farmer built a new hiding spot – a small, earthen cave in the nearby woods. Metzelaar spent many nights there.

When it became too dangerous for the farm couple to provide shelter, Metzelaar and his mother were sent to The Hague, the country’s seat of government. They eventually returned to Amsterdam on a German supply truck.

Metzelaar’s mother sewed herself a Red Cross uniform and persuaded two soldiers to give her and her son a ride. She told them that Metzelaar’s parents had been killed, and that she was a nurse taking him to an orphanage. Later, he would marvel at her acting ability. “Mothers can do strange things for the love of their children,” he said.

The eighth-graders peppered Metzelaar with questions. Was he mad that he couldn’t go outside to play when he was in hiding? Did a German soldier who caught him salvaging firewood from a bombed-out building in Amsterdam actually shoot at him? Was it hard to learn English when he moved to New York City after the war ended?

Bria Robinson, 13, asked the question that Metzelaar anticipates in some form from every audience: “If a Nazi apologized, how would you react?”

Aside from his mother, all of Metzelaar’s relatives died in concentration camps.

Metzelaar told the students that he once met an older German man at a party, and found himself wondering what the man was doing during World War II. But he doesn’t harbor bad feelings toward Germans. They’ve confronted the atrocities in their past, he said.

“The people of today are facing up to the horrors of the Holocaust,” Metzelaar said.