Johan van Hulst

Johan Willem van Hulst (28 January 1911 – 22 March 2018) was a Dutch school director, university professor, author, politician, chess player and centenarian. In 1943, with the help of the Dutch resistance and students of the nearby University of Amsterdam, he was instrumental in saving over 600 Jewish children from the nursery of the Hollandsche Schouwburg who were destined for deportation to Nazi concentration camps. For his humanitarian actions he received the Yad Vashem distinction Righteous Among the Nations from the State of Israel in 1973.

Van Hulst served as Senator of the Netherlands from July 1956 to June 1981. He was elected to be the parliamentary leader of the Christian Historical Union (CHU) in the Senate from December 1968 until June 1977, when the CHU merged into the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA). He then became the first CDA Leader in the Senate. Van Hulst previously served as the party chair of the CHU from September 1969 until February 1972. He also was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Christian Democratic Group from October 1961 until September 1968.

He later was an emeritus professor of pedagogy at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a prolific author with more than a hundred publications. He was also a noted chess player.

Van Hulst was born on 28 January 1911 in Amsterdam, the son of Gerrit van Hulst and Geertruida Hofman. He studied psychology and pedagogy at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

In the meantime he worked as a teacher and mentor in Oudewater, Utrecht and Purmerend.

In 1942 van Hulst was the director of the Reformed Teacher Training College which educated elementary school teachers at Plantage Middenlaan 27, Amsterdam. Across the street at Plantage Middenlaan 24 was the Hollandse Schouwburg theatre, the main clearing site for the Jews living in Amsterdam who had been issued deportation notices by the Nazi government.

Children who arrived at the Schouwburg were separated from their families and sent to the neighbouring crèche at Plantage Middenlaan 31 run by Henriëtte Pimentel. The crèche shared a back garden with the college that van Hulst directed.

Starting in January 1943, Pimentel and Walter Süskind, a German Jew who had been appointed by the Nazis to run the Hollandsche Schouwburg operation, began canvassing potential adoptive families for physical descriptions of children who could fit into their families without detection. Once the children's parents had agreed, the names of the children to be rescued were removed from the Nazi's registry of Jews who had passed through the Schouwburg theatre.