A Seattle couple who found refuge after the Holocaust left behind their life savings to the U.S. government.
Peter and Joan Petrasek requested in their wills to have a cashier's check made out to the Department of Treasury for the value of their estate: $847,215.57.
The wills stated that the money was to be donated "to the government of the United States of America," the Seattle Times reported.
A spokesman for the Treasury said that donations to the government are not too common, but they do happen, and the money is put in a general fund.
"He (Peter) wanted to make a statement about how much it meant to him to be an American citizen," said Peter Winn, the assistant U.S. attorney in Seattle who worked on the estate.
Ron Wright, the couple's neighbor of 30 years, told the Seattle Times that Peter grew up during the Nazi occupation of his native Czech Republic, according to the Daily Mail.
Peter's sister died in the Allied bombing of Dresden, Germany, where she worked in a factory during the war. His mother was left behind in Prague. His father had been sent to a concentration camp. The Nazis confiscated all of their belongings.
Peter was put in a youth camp associated with the Nazi air force, the Luftwaffe, but after his plane was shot down, he hiked to Switzerland and then made it to the U.S. as a refugee, the NY Daily News reported.
"As a refugee from World War II, he was very grateful to his adopted country," Winn told the Times. "He grew up with a lot of people in Eastern Europe who would have been happy to change places with him."
Joan was an Irish immigrant, KIRO 7 reported.
Peter and Joan met and then married in Ottawa, where Peter had moved after the war, in 1951. They worked in Quebec, and eventually settled down in Seattle, and Peter worked at Bethlehem Steel as a metallurgist.
Peter died at age 85 from heart failure on May 5, 2012. Joan died 13 years earlier from breast cancer at age 79.
"It really reminds you how this country was founded by immigrants, and it's pretty obvious these folks felt pretty proud they were U.S. citizens," Winn said.
