Lili Peper, Maud’s Mother talks about putting their children, Maud and Rita, into hiding

For the next three years, Maud and Rita hid from the Nazis, first with the Spronk family in Oldebroek. It was a Dutch farming village that was home to devout Christians.

Maud, “There were a lot of Dutch Christians who were, at the risk of their own lives, willing to hide Jewish children, and this family, a couple, they were elderly. They were in their 60s, had never had children, but they wanted to take us in and hide us. They took me aside, and they told me why I was there. They told me that I could never tell anyone that I was Jewish, obviously, because I could never tell anyone I wore a star. They told me that we were now going to assume the last name of Mr. and Mrs. Spronk, who we stayed with, because the story was we would be their nieces who were bombed out of a city. I was scared to death. You know, I'm trying to think. It was very hard to comprehend, but I remember this fear that I had. I had a constant fear of soldiers in uniform."

For the Nazis, exterminating Jewish children was a top priority. Susan Snyder is a curator at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. Snyder, “When children were deported to concentration camps, they usually were the first to be selected, especially to the killing centers. They were the first to be selected to be killed because they were not perceived as useful slave laborers.

Of the 1.6 million Jewish children living in Europe before World War II, only 100,000 survived the holocaust. Most were hidden children. Some were shuttered away in attics, cellars, or wardrobes with false panels. Some were hidden in convents. Others hid in villages, in the woods, or on farms.

It was too dangerous for Maud and Rita to attend school, but Maud's Jewish kindergarten teacher from their hometown of Amersfoort was also hiding in Oldebroek. She was staying with Tanny, Maud's "Aunt", and on Sundays, after Maud and Rita attended church, she taught them how to read and write. One day their teacher and others hidden on the farm disappeared.

Maud, “I never knew what happened. I imagined they were found, but nobody told me the story until about ten years ago. That the Germans had something called a razzia, which was a search, because they had made an edict that by 1943, Holland would be Jew free, so they knew many Jews were being hidden. And many times, people revealed. They collaborated and revealed where Jews were hidden. So evidently, someone told that they were there, and they came on the farm, the German soldiers, and they went exactly to that haystack where they were hiding and pulled them out.”

That same night, Dutch Nazis shot and killed the teacher, her husband, and the widow's son. Some months later, two years after the Peper girls first arrived in Oldebroek, there were rumors that German soldiers were asking for the widow Spronk. Once again, the Peper girls were whisked away by the Dutch underground, this time to a fishing village called Elberg. Again, they were hidden by Christians. The family's name was Westerink. They had a teenaged daughter named Jo.

Maud, “I remember one day, the family asked me to go to a neighboring farm in the next village or in between the next town, and my sister and I started out in the morning,and we walked along the dike of this huge lake now. There was nothing. One side water, the other side meadows, and as we were walking, airplanes came over, Allied planes to bomb. And Germany sent up their little planes, and there was a lot going on over our heads, shooting. So I was afraid because the Germans had great sport in their little fighter planes to just swoop down on a road and just shoot people off their bicycles or people walking, and here are two little girls just on a dike, so I grabbed my sister, and we laid by the side of the dike and watched this whole thing before our eyes and never did get to the farm.

I remember, also, that we were very hungry, and a whole group of us kids used to go out and make like a little fire and catch a little smelt and a little fish, put a stick through it and barbeque it, or find big bugs with big bodies to eat because we were hungry.”