The Quiet Courage of Johan van Hulst

In the darkest years of World War II, when fear governed daily life and silence was often the safest choice, one school principal in Amsterdam chose another path.

Johan van Hulst was not a soldier. He carried no weapon. He held no official power beyond the walls of a teacher's college. Yet through patience, restraint, and extraordinary moral resolve, he helped rescue hundreds of Jewish children from deportation; often with nothing more than calm words, careful timing, and the courage to act without recognition.

The Quiet Courage of Johan van Hulst traces the life of a man who believed that decency, practiced steadily and without spectacle, could defy even the most brutal machinery of evil. From his early years as an educator, through the harrowing choices forced upon him during Nazi occupation, to the lifelong weight of memory that followed, this biography reveals how ordinary spaces; a classroom, a gate, a moment's hesitation; became sites of quiet resistance.