Carla Peperzak was born in Amsterdam in 1923 to a Jewish family. Although Carla's mother was not born Jewish, she had been adopted by a Jewish family, and as a teen and adult came to embrace the faith. Carla was a typical youth of the time. She played field hockey, skated on Amsterdam’s canals, and went to parties. She also attended synagogue and Hebrew school where one of her fellow students was Margot Frank, the older sister of Anne Frank. In 1940, the year Carla graduated from high school, Germany invaded the Netherlands. By 1941 the Nazis forced Dutch Jews to register with the state, and they were issued identification papers marke d with a “J.” Thanks to a sympathetic SS member, and perhaps due to Carla's mother's background, Carla's father arranged to have her papers changed to remove the J.
That year, at the age of 18, Carla joined the Dutch resistance. She helped save her aunt, uncle, and two cousins, hiding them at a farmhouse in the Dutch countryside. Later, disguised as a German nurse, Carla rescued her young cousin from a train bound for Westerbork, a transit camp for Dutch Jews who were then sent to killing center s in Nazi-occupied Poland. Throughout the war, she continued to secure hiding places for Jews, published an underground newspaper, and created fake identification papers and ration cards. While Carla and her immediate family survived the Holocaust, 18 members of her family did not. In the aftermath of the war, she met her husband Paul, a Dutch Catholic. In the ensuing decades, Carla lived and traveled across the world with her husband, who worked for the United Nations. In 2004 she moved to Spokane and has been actively engaged in sharing her story as part of the Holocaust Center for Humanity's Speakers Bureau.
“I was 18, 19, 20. I was not married. I did not have any responsibility–only for myself–and that made a big difference...I felt I could help. I had the opportunity.” - Carla Peperzak
Survivor Encyclopedia: Washington State - Carla Peperzak. Read more about Carla, view photos of Carla and her family, and watch video clips.
Granddaughter of Hungarian Auschwitz survivor Vera Frank Federman, Breeze Dahlberg shares her grandmother's story.
Beverley Silver shares the story of both of her parents, Jewish Holocaust survivors Johanna Stern Moss and Malcolm Moss.
Beverley’s mother Johanna was born in Germany in 1925. As the Nazis came to power, her grandmother, Anna Stern, feared for her granddaughter’s life and made arrangements for Johanna to escape Germany on a Kindertransport.
Leaving her father, grandmother, and extended family, Johanna sailed to England in 1939, where she and 24 other refugee girls lived in a hostel sponsored by a Jewish refugee committee in the town of Middlesbrough. Johanna’s father managed to escape to the United States shortly before World War II broke out. It was too dangerous during wartime, however, for Johanna to travel across the Atlantic Ocean to join him. Instead, Johanna remained in Middlesbrough living with a loving and generous English family, the Levys. Finally, in 1946 she arrived in the United States and was reunited with her father, but tragically, many of her relatives were killed in the Holocaust.
Beverley’s father Malcolm was born Moizesz Moskiewicz in Poland in 1912 to a large Jewish family. He graduated from the Vienna Academy of Design with an ambition to become a clothing designer. Fearful of an impending German invasion of Poland, Malcolm fled to Switzerland in 1938, where, after World War II began, he was interned in a labor camp for Jewish refugees. Malcolm immigrated to the United States in 1945 and joined his brother, his only relative who survived the Holocaust.
Johanna and Malcolm met and married in New York in 1946. Malcolm continued his career as a clothing designer in the United States, and he and Johanna raised three children in New York and Illinois before retiring to San Diego. Malcolm passed away in 1986 and Johanna in 2019.
Beverley Silver spent her career as an art educator, working extensively in K-12 public and private schools, museum, and university settings. Beverley retired in 2021 from Seattle University, where she directed the Job Placement Office in the College of Education. She enjoys spending time with her children and grandchildren, and became a member of the Holocaust Center Speakers Bureau in 2022 with the hope of keeping her parents’ legacy of survival alive.
Betsy Touriel-Kapner, the daughter of Austrian Holocaust survivors, tells the stories of her parents escape from Austria to Bolivia.
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Betsy Touriel-Kapner’s maternal grandparents, Gisela and Friedrich Aschkenasi, lived in Vienna, Austria, where they were married in 1924. Their daughter Gerda was born in 1932. In March 1938, the Nazis annexed Austria (an event termed “the Anschluss”) and soon enacted laws to strip Jews of their citizenship and careers. Jewish children, like Gerda, could no longer attend school. Betsy’s grandfather was sent to Dachau concentration camp, then Buchenwald, with other Austrian Jews who were prominent community members or businessmen. Gisela sold most of their belongings to bribe her husband out of Buchenwald.
The family of three managed to leave Austria by ship at the eve of World War II, traveling to Italy, then Chile, and overland to Bolivia with a visa from the Bolivian consulate. A German mining baron, Mauritz Hochschild, who operated tin mines in Bolivia, had convinced the Bolivian president to offer visas to Jews facing persecution in Austria and Germany. Some of these refugees, like Betsy’s grandparents, stayed in Bolivia permanently. Her grandfather became vice president of the mines run by Hochschild – who overall helped save nearly 20,000 Jews.
Betsy’s mother Gerda spent the rest of her childhood in Bolivia and attended high school and college there. Gerda travelled to Seattle to visit family in the 1950s, when she met a local man, Gabriel Touriel, who soon became her husband. They made their home in Tacoma, where Betsy and her brothers were born and raised.
After retiring from a career in the aerospace industry, Betsy felt a responsibility to share the story of her relatives and their unusual escape from Europe. Her grandparents and mother were refugees in South America, and her mother was later an immigrant to the United States. Their experiences of courage and rescue offer enduring lessons of resilience. Since 2020, Betsy has been a member of the Holocaust Center for Humanity Speakers Bureau, telling this family history to students and community members.