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Johan van Hulst, Who Helped Save 600 Children From the Nazis, Dies at 107
In the spring and summer of 1943 in Amsterdam, Johan van Hulst was at the center of a daring scheme to save Jewish children from being sent to a concentration camp.
The children — from infants to 12-year-olds — had been taken from their parents at a deportation center and brought by nursery workers to a nursery next to the teachers’ college where Mr. van Hulst was the principal.
The rescue plan was simple but risky: the children were surreptitiously handed over a hedge between the nursery and the college and hidden in a classroom until they could be smuggled to the countryside by Dutch Resistance groups.
Mr. van Hulst is credited with helping to rescue as many as 600 children, yet he was haunted by what he could not do. With up to 100 children still in the nursery as it was about to be shut down that September, Mr. van Hulst was asked how many more he could smuggle out.
“That was the most difficult day of my life,” he told Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem, which in 1972 named him one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a designation for non-Jews who rescued Jews. He is one of 5,595 Dutch people given the honor.
“You realize that you cannot possibly take all the children with you,” he said. “You know for a fact that the children you leave behind are going to die. I took 12 with me. Later on, I asked myself, ‘Why not 13?’ ”
Nearly 70 years later, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel visited the Netherlands in 2012, he met Mr. van Hulst and told him: “We say those who save one life saves a universe. You saved hundreds of universes.”
Mr. van Hulst died on March 22 in Amsterdam, the Dutch Senate announced. He was 107.
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