Carla Olman Peperzak

Keys of My Life Carla Olman Peperzak

"Carla Olman Peperzak donned a blue-and-white nurse's uniform and made her way to Amsterdam's Central Station. She had received word that an aunt and five cousins would be passing through on the way to Westerbork, the Nazi detention center in northeast Holland. Her uncle had already been seized by the Nazis. So when Peperzak found her relatives in a railcar waiting on the tracks she asked if she could take the youngest one. She carried the toddler off the train. But the station was teeming with German soldiers, and a couple of them stopped her. Who are you and where are you going, they wanted to know. Peperzak was a teenage wartime Dutch Resistance operative who, by her estimation, helped hide approximately 40 Jews from the Germans during World War II. She forged identification papers for about five dozen others, served as a messenger for the Underground movement and helped publish a newsletter of Allied Forces' activities on a banned mimeograph machine. These are not the things she told the Nazis. In German, which she had learned in school as well as from her Austrian nanny, Peperzak said the boy was sick and needed to get to a hospital. She was young, attractive and Jewish. She was also disguised as a German nurse, with a stolen medical identification card in her pocket. If her true identity had been discovered, "That would have been the end of me." Still, she didn't consider herself particularly brave. Her resistance was born of gratitude. Peperzak didn't wear a star. So she helped those who did. "I was 18, 19, 20. I was not married. I did not have any responsibility - only for myself - and that made a big difference," she said. "I felt I could help. I had the opportunity.""