The teacher who saved hundreds of children during the Holocaust

In 1943, Dutch teacher Johan van Hulst put his life on the line to save Jewish children from Nazi death camps. The children had been taken from an overcrowded SS-run deportation center in Amsterdam and placed temporarily in a nursery next door to the teachers college where van Hulst was principal. He helped concoct an audacious scheme to stop them from being sent to extermination camps: Children were secretly passed across a hedge between the nursery and the college, hidden in a classroom, and later smuggled to the countryside by Dutch resistance groups. Records were falsified to cover up the disappearances. Van Hulst rescued as many as 600 children, but was haunted by those he failed to save. When the nursery was cleared out that September, he was asked how many of the remaining 100 children he could smuggle out. “I took 12,” he said. “Later on, I asked myself, ‘Why not 13?’”

Van Hulst was deputy principal at the training college when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, said The New York Times. Under financial pressure, the Dutch government cut a subsidy for teachers’ salaries, “seemingly dooming the school to closing.” But van Hulst came up with a plan to ask students’ parents for funding, “saving the school and helping him rise to principal.”

He “spent the last few weeks of the war in hiding,” said BBC.co.uk, “having been alerted that Nazis were coming to arrest him only minutes before they arrived.” Later in life, he served as a Dutch senator and from 1961 to 1968 as a member of the European Parliament. He rarely spoke of his actions in World War II, saying, “I actually only think [about] those few thousand children that I could not save.”