Another good news story for us all.
A Dutch couple posthumously received the highest honor for non-Jews from Israel’s Holocaust center Thursday for their bravery in sheltering a Jewish family from the Nazis during World War II.
Hendrikus and Martha Snapper were named “Righteous Among the Nations” at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
[…] As a labor official in the town of Naaldwijk, Hendrikus Snapper was confronted early on with the registration of Jews, the appropriation of Jewish property and the expulsion of Jewish children from public schools, Yad Vashem officials said.
In the summer of 1942, he became active in a local underground group and was put in contact with a Jewish couple, Rosa and Levy de Hartog.
The de Hartogs had received a deportation notice and were frantically searching for a hiding place. The Snappers decided to open their home to Rosa de Hartog, whom they presented as their housekeeper. They found hiding places for Levy de Hartog and their five children, according to Yad Vashem officials.
[…] “Most houses (in the Netherlands) were too small for hiding spaces. People had to take in strangers in clear view and concoct a reason for their presence,” said Johan Snapper, the Snappers’ son, now a professor of German and Dutch studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
The penalty for hiding Jews was a concentration camp or death, Snapper said, speaking at the ceremony. “Our parents understood that.”
In May 1943, a massive recruitment of Dutch men for forced labor in Germany began. Snapper used his position at the labor exchange to forge documents and falsify information for the de Hartogs.
[…] The entire de Hartog family survived the war and was reunited afterward. A photograph of the two families together after liberation was on display during the ceremony.
More than 30 members of the extended Snapper family traveled to Israel for the ceremony. Surviving children of the de Hartogs – Truus de Hartog of the Netherlands, and Salomon de Hartog of Israel – were also present.
“Nothing has ever made a bigger impact on me, as young as I was,” Johan Snapper said of witnessing his parents’ heroism.
Shabbat Shalom.
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What noble, courageous people. Imagine living for three years or more with the stress of knowing that discovery meant death, probably for your whole family.
The Dutch were very short of food during the war, and it was controlled by the Nazis. In 1944-1945 they went through the “Hunger Winter” where many Dutch died from malnutrition or outright starvation. The people hiding the Jews had not only to hide them or ocme up with an excuse for having them around that would pass muster with the Nazis, they also had to feed them. This is not a small point; think about how grouchy one gets on a diet. The Dutch were starving.
Nobility, courage, selflessness, they deserve recognition.
How soon the free world forgets. Why must the Neville Chamberlains always give us opportunity to display such heroism? Sometimes it seems like 1938 all over again.
It does, doesn’t it?
In some extenuation of the appeasers of the 1930s they thought they were preventing another WWI, and that nothing they could imagine could be worse than another one of those. They were not imaginative enough. They also did not know how it would come out. We know how it came out, so we have no such excuse.
Tryng to appease the unappeasable, like the Pharaohs of Tehran, is futile and stupid.