Dutch Resistance speaker meets Gar-Pal 8th graders

Carla Peperzak, who was honored by the Washington State Senate in March for her heroism in the Dutch Resistance during World War II and for her work in educating current generations, shared her story with Tina Coles' eighth grade language arts classes at the Garfield-Palouse Middle School April 2.

The class was just finishing up a unit on the Holocaust, in which the students read books like In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and The Boy Who Dared. They prepared a research project on various aspects of the Holocaust.

Peperzak was a teenager in Holland during the War and avoided deportation as a Jew only because her mother was born Catholic and her father managed to get the family non-Jewish identification papers. She was 18 when she began her work with the Dutch Resistance, publishing a weekly newspaper, creating new IDs and helping others find hiding places or otherwise escape the death camps. Mrs. Peperzak lived across the street from Anne Frank's family before they went into hiding and had been friends with Anne's sister Margot. Both Anne and Margot perished in the Holocaust.

Students were amazed at the opportunity to sit and talk with someone who had lived through the Holocaust, and it made the reading and research they had been doing very real and alive.