Thursday, March 29, 2018

VANHULST: RIGHTEOUS AMONG THE NATIONS

   AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Johan van Hulst, a Dutch seminary leader who saved hundreds of Jewish children during the Holocaust and later became a senator, has died at the age of 107.
   Van Hulst and resistance activists smuggled the children to safety over several months. He was the director of a Protestant religious seminary in Amsterdam with a yard that bordered on the nursery section of a facility in which the Nazis and collaborators imprisoned Jews before their dispatch to concentration camps.
   The late director, who died Thursday, hid in his school the children from the nursery of the Hollandsche Schouwburg, whom he and his helpers would hoist over the hedge that separated the two yards. From there, resistance activists and fighters would smuggle the children to safehouses, sometimes in laundry baskets and other times on bicycles, pretending that the children were their own.

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