(Editor's note: This article was submitted by reader Don Jaenicke.)

As the debate continues to rage about the Holocaust, it is fortunate that we still have witnesses who experienced this nightmare and can
verify that it was real during World War II.

The ghosts of World War II prison camps are still present among survivors who remained alive through internments and others who hid from the Nazis to avoid being imprisoned. No horror movie could portray the tragedy and fear that gripped Jewish residents during the time that six million of them were murdered in prison camps like Auschwitz.

More than a million of the victims were children.

Peter Metzelaar is a well known speaker, who survived the holocaust era, and tells his dramatic story to retirement home residents, schools, universities, churches, and groups interested in that part of history, residents, many of whom had only a dim recollection and knowledge of the Holocaust. He recently told his story to the residents of Daystar Retirement Village in West Seattle.

Metzelaar was born in Amsterdam, Holland in 1935. When he was seven, the Nazis seized his entire family expect for him and his mother. At age 7, he remembers seeing German soldiers marching through the streets of Amsterdam with fixed bayonets .

Frequently they rounded up people who wore a yellow star with the word “JOOD”, the Dutch word for Jew, and took them away.

To escape capture by the Nazis, Peter and his moher, with the help of the Dutch underground, traveled to northern Holland where they were sheltered by the Klaas Post family on a farm where they lived in fear the Nazis would find them. Should Peter and his other be found by the Nazis, not only they, but the entire Post family would have been sent to an extermination camp and murdered.

Peter and his mother never went outside in the daytime, and hid under the floorboard of the Post’s home when the Germans came in their trucks, searching for possible hidden Jews.

The German raids became so frequent that Klaas asked Peter to help him dig a hole in the side of an adjacent forest. It was about 3-by-3-by-6 covered with vegetation. It turned into a small cave.

Peter and his mom would run for the cave when they heard the German trucks approaching. After two years, they left the farm as it became too dangerous and the likelihood of discovery became very real. Once again, the underground found two elderly ladies who offered shelter to Peter and his mother in their apartment at the city of The Hague.

One day after a British air raid on The Hague, where the Germans had built the launching pads for their lethal V-2 rockets, Peter was walking with his mother. Peter looked for pieces of shrapnel, which the kids in school traded. He came upon a large piece, which excitedly he picked up and showed his mother. She immediately made him throw it away. A few moments later there was an explosion. What Peter had found was “live.”

The Canadians liberated Holland on May 14, 1945. When he was 13 they migrated to the U. S.

After many years he has told his story hundreds of times at schools, universities, synagogues and churches, as well as retirement communities. He has written a memoir titled “Impact." It has many testimonial letters from individuals who have heard his story and commented on how it has impacted their lives.

Peter belongs to the Speaker’s Bureau of the Washington State Holocaust Educational Resource Center.