World War II officially ended some seventy years ago, but for some people, it lives on.

Gerda Blokhuis Vandenhaak, who spent the war in the Netherlands, still recalls the hunger and fear she felt throughout the war-that sticks out more than hearing about the two little boys killed or the blank expression of her father when she visited him in a concentration camp.

She looks back at the confusion she felt as a child, and how she always managed to get food for her family as a seven-year-old-even if it meant breaking curfew to roam the countryside and beg at a...