Johan van Hulst Saved 600 Dutch Children From the Nazis. This Reader’s Father Was One of Them.
Ulrika Citron always wondered how her father survived the Holocaust. Then she read the obituary of the man she believes saved him.
Ulrika Citron always wondered how her father survived the Holocaust. He never talked about it or relayed stories of how he was separated from his parents and siblings. To Ms. Citron, 54, his past remained a mystery.
She had researched his past but didn’t have all the answers. She believes she found the final piece of the puzzle when she read Johan van Hulst’s obituary in The New York Times and in The Washington Post.
“I had chills!” Ms. Citron wrote in a Facebook message to The Times after reading Mr. van Hulst’s obituary in early April. “I couldn’t believe it. I just knew that this man and his partners had saved the four kids.”
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The Times contacted Ms. Citron after seeing her comment on a Facebook post of Mr. van Hulst’s obituary.
When Ms. Citron was a child growing up in Norrkoping, Sweden, she was very close with her maternal grandparents. She wondered why she did not have paternal grandparents doting on her as well, but her father was tight-lipped about his family and his past.
As an adult, Ms. Citron moved to the United States, where she studied journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia and worked in television in both Philadelphia and New York, where she still lives and where she and her husband raised three children, now 25, 23 and 18. She is co-chairwoman for one of the boards of the USC Shoah Foundation, the organization founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994 to collect interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses as well as survivors of other genocides. But still she lacked information about her own history.
Ms. Citron didn’t grow up Jewish; her mother was not Jewish, and her parents divorced when she was 5. She has little contact with her father. “I was always curious, interested in history, and I did all this research” into her family’s secrets, Ms. Citron said in a phone interview.
As far as she knew, her father was Swedish, but she had overheard him tell others he was Dutch. She confirmed this after visiting the Netherlands and meeting her father’s three siblings there.
How, she wondered, had her father survived the Holocaust in the Netherlands? “How was my father saved, and so many other people murdered?” she asked. Of the 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands when Germany invaded in May 1940, more than 100,000 were sent to concentration camps, according to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial.
Then, she read The New York Times obituary for Johan van Hulst.
Mr. van Hulst died on March 22 in Amsterdam, his death announced by the Dutch Senate. He is credited with rescuing more than 600 Dutch children from the Nazis in Amsterdam during the spring and summer of 1943.
Children under 12 had been separated from their parents, who were held in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, Amsterdam’s municipal theater, awaiting deportation to concentration camps. The children were held in a Jewish nursery across the street from the theater. Mr. van Hulst was principal of a teachers’ college adjacent to the nursery.
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The children were handed over a hedge, hidden in baskets and sacks while blocked from the view of SS officers by a tram that made stops on a street between the theater and the teachers’ college, according to documents provided by Yad Vashem. The organization in 1972 named Mr. van Hulst one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a designation for non-Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.
The success of the operation depended on Mr. van Hulst and his student helpers’ awareness of the tram schedule, according to the documents.
The children were then smuggled to the countryside by Dutch resistance groups. Ms. Citron’s father and his siblings were separated, and all four were raised by different families, she said.
In April 1943, Ms. Citron’s paternal grandparents were sent from the Amsterdam theater to the Westerbork concentration camp in the northeast part of the Netherlands, and from there to the Sobibor camp in Poland, where they were killed upon arrival, according to records provided by Steven Vitto, a researcher at the National Institute for Holocaust Documentation at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
Bart Wallet, a historian at Vrije University in Amsterdam, confirmed that Ms. Citron’s father and his three siblings survived the war in hiding. Dr. Wallet said that the children were placed in the custody of the Jewish relief organization Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled after the war.
Ms. Citron said that her father moved to Sweden when he was 18, and was granted amnesty there. He became a Swedish citizen. She said he was “angry and bitter” that the Netherlands never granted him citizenship. He was born stateless, and after the war was “still a stateless Jew, stateless person,” she said. “It traumatized him.”
She contacted her father’s siblings five years ago and maintains a relationship with them. She continues to travel to Amsterdam and Israel to do research, with the hopes of writing a book. She hopes that the Netherlands will do more to recognize Holocaust victims and survivors. “Not much has been done to remember them,” Ms. Citron said, in contrast to what she has seen in other European countries. But, she said, “the conversation is shifting.”
Ms. Citron traveled to Amsterdam for Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 12 and attended a ceremony in the Hollandsche Schouwburg in Amsterdam, where her father’s family was divided. The theater contains a memorial to the Dutch Jews who perished in the Holocaust, and will soon be renovated and expanded into a museum about the events that transpired there.
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