Tag: Carla Peperzak

When we grow up, we want to be like Carla Peperzak. That was how my wife and I felt after our three-hour lunch and visit with Peperzak in her home at Rockwood Retirement Communities. At 99 years old, she is mentally and physically much younger. Her passion for teaching children about the horrors of the Holocaust is keen and always eager.

Holocaust survivor and Spokane resident Carla Peperzak will join several Gonzaga University historians and representatives of Seattle’s Holocaust Center for Humanity to present “Remembering Our Past to Inform Our Future” tonight from 7-8:30 p.m. in the Hemmingson Ballroom.

The memoir was written for her descendants—the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren she would never have had if the Nazis found out she was Jewish or if they found out she was helping Jews hide after they invaded her country on May 10, 1940.

Carla Peperzak was 16 when the German occupation started in her native Holland in the spring of 1940. She was 18 when she first helped a family go into hiding.