A Snake on the Heart

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Jan Juergen (John) Petersen was a charismatic man who some thought of as a spiritual guru. Petersen's charm helped him survive the five-year Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. But beneath his genial exterior was a darker side. He served in the Dutch SS but was also a member of the Schutzgruppe, a semi-military organization attached to the German army. He played these organizations against each other, assisting both the Germans and the Dutch resistance, contributing to some horrors, including the Holocaust, and mitigating others.

Years later, in Canada, he became a foster parent and a social worker. But the traumas he suffered before and during the war, and from his postwar imprisonment as a collaborator, sowed mental health issues that would affect him and those around him for the rest of his life, preventing him from accepting the truth about himself and learning from it.

From the mystical to the malevolent, Petersen's story illustrates the complicated and, at times, damaging threads that can bind us within our relationships.

For biographer Patrick Wolfe, what initially was a remarkable fact-is-stranger-than-fiction story shifted over time to become "a cautionary tale, one that is bizarre and compelling and ultimately stark and mysterious."