SPOKANE, Wash. — Tucked in the corner of her apartment building lobby, Carla Peperzak is signing copies of her recently released book, "Keys of My Life."
“The memoir is fairly small -- 236 pages in all,” she said.
But Peperzak has a big, long story to tell. Her life is something out of a best-selling fictional novel.
But while her stories are somewhat unimaginable, they are real.
“It’s still always difficult —sometimes it’s harder than other times,” she said.
Lets's start here: At a recent party in Spokane, Washington, where people gathered to celebrate Peperzak's 95th birthday.
Surrounded by generations of family, you can see that her story is one that includes so much love. It's her family that encouraged her to write the book and in the end, it is her family that is her greatest revenge.
“The best revenge is to have family —they didn’t [us] want to have family, to have all those kids,” she said.
Peperzak is referring to the Nazis, who occupied Peperzak's native home of Holland in the 1940s. She was only a teenager when World War II came directly to her doorstep.
“I was very much aware of what was going on because from the beginning of 1942 to we had to wear a star,” she remembered.
Soon, family members would board trains, bound for hellish camps. Many were never seen again.
And that is when Peperzak went from being a teen planning her educational future to a member of the underground.
A beautiful Jewish girl in 1940s Europe had to be careful, for every step she took was potentially one step closer to getting caught.
“I got involved with the underground and was helping friends and family go into hiding. First family I decided to help was my uncle and his wife and two little ones. I got really quite involved,” she said. “Helped maybe about 40 people to go into hiding and they all lived through the war.”
And so many of those saved by Peperzak were her family members--cousins she should have been babysitting and celebrating family milestones with, but was instead squirreling them away in secret spaces and with sympathetic families.
“Sometimes I went into hiding myself, be careful, but I was very lucky,” she said.
And there is no doubt…Peperzak was lucky. She survived—but certainly came away scarred.
“The first 50 years were too painful, too many memories, and too difficult,” she said.
She was silent on the subject, until one day her granddaughter asked her to speak at her elementary school.
Following that presentation, the words spilled out, and she now speaks to dozens of groups each year.
All providing a willing audience, eager to hear her story. It's all so fascinating to those of us who have only lived World War II through books and movies. But her talks are a first-hand account.
Like the story of a nearby family in Amsterdam—the family that became famous only after the death of their daughter, Anne Frank. She's known to most of us through her diary, her story told over again through books, plays, and movies. Hiding from the Nazis only to be discovered and sent to a concentration cap.
Peperzak knew Anne and her family.
“ I still can’t see a play or movie,” she said of Anne Frank.
She finally decided not to keep her story inside and instead tell her story. But it's not one of forgiveness.
“You cannot forgive people who kill,” she said.
But she does ask for one thing. She encourages everyone to learn respect, hoping that respecting each other can keep history from repeating itself.
“We have to try and teach our young people to learn respect, not only for the people they know but for the people they don’t know,” she said.
And while that's the main take-away - -the key word she wants all of us to hear -- there is so much she wanted her family to know. Her loved ones are the impetus behind her book. It's the reason she spent 18 years writing her story, putting down the family history between book covers. After all, for her family is her greatest story.
