TORONTO – Betty Laron will never forget her father’s words the day he told her their family would have to go into hiding to escape the Nazis.
“My father said, ‘If we have to hang, then it will be on the last gallows,'” she recalls.
Laron was on the cusp of her 13th birthday in Zevenaar, the Netherlands, in early 1943. Across the country in Amsterdam, another girl of the same age, Anne Frank, was already hiding in her Secret Annex.
Their lives would follow similar paths up until a point — while Frank was discovered in 1944 and later died of typhus in Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Laron and her family would escape detection and survive.
The 85-year-old, who now lives in Burlington, Ont., shares her memories in an episode of History’s “War Story” airing Remembrance Day. Six episodes of the acclaimed documentary series will be broadcast from Friday to Tuesday, all focusing on the battles in Europe in 1944.
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