Remarkable reunion 'THE GIRL MY PARENTS SAVED'

How Kiwi Marcel found the child his mum and dad hid from the Nazis

- Kasia De VydtJillings

More than 80 years ago in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, young Dutch couple Jo and Frits Hakkens risked everything, hiding and raising a Jewish toddler named Elli Szanowski as their own.

Their actions saved little Elli's life even though after 1944, they never saw her again.

But decades later in New Zealand, Jo and Frits' son Marcel and his wife Gloria started searching and against all odds, finally found Elli alive and well on the other side of the world in Brazil.

"They were just doing the right thing," Marcel, 74, explains simply of his parents' bravery and resistance efforts during World War II. "Mum used to tell us about walking across the railway line to pick up coal or bits of food that came off the open carriages.

"Machine guns were pointing at her and Germans were yelling at her. She replied something like, 'You can kill me or I can pick this up.' She was defiant, but she was also just doing what she had to." For Jo, the war years meant finding courage in impossible moments. She was working as a nanny and housekeeper for Elli's family when the little girl's father Abraham, who was a tailor, was rounded up with many other Jews and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp while out buying a birthday gift for his wife Gita.

Fearing for her life, Gita was forced to flee Amsterdam with the help of Frits, who meticulously forged false identity papers to cross the borders into neutral Switzerland.

The journey would have been impossible with her two daughters Leny, then three, and Elli, 14 months.

So she entrusted their care to two separate families.

For more than two years, Elli lived with Jo and Frits, who would hide her when it was necessary in a concealed compartment between the two floors of their apartment.

Their home was raided more than once, yet Elli remained undiscovered.