Hulst van Johan

Hulst van, Johan Wilhelm Johan van Hulst was a practicing strictly Calvinist (“Gereformeerd”) Protestant, father of two, and lecturer at the Calvinist Teachers Training College in Amsterdam. When, in the early summer of 1942, Secretary-General J. van Dam tried to force the school to close down by withholding its subsidy, Johan and the majority of the other lecturers rebelled. They decided to continue running the school with or without the subsidy. The school’s elderly principal opposed their position and resigned. On September 1, Johan took over as principal and immediately began fund-raising activities. The Reformed Teachers Training College was located at 27 Plantage Middenlaan, only two buildings away from the Jewish crèche from where, beginning in January 1943, Jewish children were being smuggled out and hidden at addresses outside Amsterdam. This had expanded into a large-scale operation. Together with the elderly janitor van Wijngaarden, Johan helped out by allowing those smuggling the children to use his school as a transit point. The back of the Teachers Training College’s garden bordered on the day-care center’s garden. Jewish children, and infants in particular, were passed over the low fence and temporarily hidden by Johan in one of the classrooms until they were picked up by members of one of the children’s rescue organizations. Most of the school’s students were aware of what was going on. In his rare free moments, Johan himself also arranged underground addresses. The four organizations working with the children smuggled out at least 100 Jewish children via the Teachers Training College. Several Jews, including Walter Suskind, Betty Oudkerk, Harry and Sienei Cohen and Henriette Piemental helped and were crucial to the rescue of children from the crèche. Johan himself helped another 100 to disappear or go with incidental helpers, including two of his students. When, in late September 1943, the crèche was about to be cleared out, the principal, Virrie Cohen, came to see him and said: “The crèche is crowded. Please come and take a few children with you and put them up in the college for the moment, and maybe they will be picked up today.” “Now try to imagine 80, 90, perhaps 70 or 100 children standing there, and you have to decide which children to take with you…. That was the most difficult day of my life,” Johan recalled. “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 twelve with me. Later on I asked myself: ‘Why not thirteen?’” After the crèche and the Hollandsche Schouwburg were closed, Johan continued to help people in hiding. He succeeded in keeping the Teachers Training College open until the end of the war, even after he was suddenly forced to go into hiding just three weeks before the liberation. On March 8, 1972, Yad Vashem recognized Johan van Hulst as Righteous Among the Nations.