Johan van Hulst has died at the age of 107, but his legacy as the Dutchman who saved 600 Jewish babies and children from Nazis during the Holocaust will live on in history.
As lecturer for the Calvinist Teachers Training College in Amsterdam during the second World War, Hulst got involved in a growing operation to help smuggle Jewish children to safety by providing a temporary hiding space while waiting for members of a rescue organization to collect them, CNN reported.
The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem named Hulst as Righteous Among the Nation in 1972 for his efforts, which it described as a “large scale” operation, the Portland Press Herald noted.
In a previous interview with the memorial center, Hulst recalled the exact moment he was enlisted to help the children.
“Try to imagine 80, 90, perhaps 70 or 100 children standing there, and you have to decide which children to take with you,” he said.
“That was the most difficult day of my life. You realize that you cannot possibly take all the children with you. 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?’”
In order for the operation to succeed, the neighborhood had to maintain a friendly façade with the Nazis, but Hulst developed a trick to gain their confidence.
“Johan had an anecdote,” Annemiek Gringold, a curator in Amsterdam's Jewish Cultural Quarter, told the BBC.
“His students would be watching the SS guards and he would shout at the students 'Let these people do their job, it's none of your business', while winking at the SS guards, trying to gain their trust.”
When the war came to an end, Hulst became a member of the Christian Democratic Appeal Party and later he became a Dutch senator, according to CNN.
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