Jaap Penraat Dies at 88; Saved Hundreds in Holocaust
deb...@comcast.net
By DOUGLAS MARTIN, NY Times
Published: July 2, 2006
Jaap Penraat, an architect and industrial designer who saved 406 Jews
in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands by forging false documents and taking
them to safety, died last Sunday at his home in Catskill, N.Y. He was
88.
The cause was esophageal cancer, his daughter Noëlle Penraat said.
Mr. Penraat, whose first name is pronounced "yahp," refused for many
years to talk about his wartime experience. When he finally did, he
simply said that he had done the decent thing.
"You do these things because in your mind there is no other way of
doing it," he said in an interview with The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in
2000.
He was imprisoned when his counterfeiting was discovered. He was
tortured, but told his captors nothing. There were harrowing
experiences as he shepherded Jews masquerading as construction workers
across Europe.
Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to victims of the Holocaust,
awarded Mr. Penraat the designation "Righteous Among the Nations" and
put him on its honor roll in Jerusalem.
His medal carried this proverb: "He who saves a single human life saves
the entire universe."
Most Dutch Jews did not survive the Holocaust; of the 140,000 who lived
there before the Nazis invaded on May 10, 1940, about 110,000 died.
Only Poland lost a larger proportion of its Jewish population.
Jacob Penraat was born on April 11, 1918, in Amsterdam and studied
design there. As a boy, he switched off lights for Jewish neighbors at
sunset on Fridays, to help them avoid work, forbidden on the Sabbath.
He was a young architect and draftsman when Nazi occupiers took
escalating measures against Jews. First, they were prohibited from
being air-raid wardens, then barred from the civil service, then made
to register.
A secret resistance formed to help them. Mr. Penraat, then in his 20's
and a nonpracticing Christian, marshaled his design talents to make
fake identity cards. A friend married to a German gave him copies of
official papers and stamps for models. He was soon discovered and went
to prison for several months.
The situation for Jews worsened, and resistance cells raced to make
false travel papers. But escaping the country was hard, because Germans
controlled countries and seas bordering the Netherlands.
Mr. Penraat and his friends devised a plan to disguise Jews as
construction workers for the wall that Hitler was building along
France's Atlantic Coast. He forged travel documents, using a real
construction company's letterhead.
He took the Jews to Lille, France, where he presented them to the
French underground for transport to neutral Spain. He made about 20
trips, accompanying about 20 Jews each time.
Once, he approached German guards outside a school and told them his
laborers needed lodging. He complained about the food, but called this
"one of the first times a German Army played host to a bunch of Jews."
Only one of the men moved by Mr. Penraat died, and that man was
accidentally hit by a train. But Mr. Penraat trembled whenever he
handed papers to a clerk.
"You're there, a woman walks away and either she comes back with papers
or she comes back with soldiers," he said in an interview with The
Poughkeepsie Journal. "And they would shoot you right then and there,
so other people could see what happens when you do anything against the
German Army."
Hudson Talbott, a longtime friend of Mr. Penraat's who wrote a
children's book about his experiences ("Forging Freedom: A True Story
of Heroism During the Holocaust") said his research indicated there was
a daredevil aspect to the missions.
"The feeling I get is that he just loved the idea of putting one over
on the Nazis," Mr. Talbott said in an interview with The Albany Times
Union. "It wasn't a joke, or a game, but clearly there was something
about fooling them that was an important aspect of this."
After 1944, the trips were too risky, and Mr. Penraat hid in a village,
subsisting on sugar beets. After the war, he became a noted designer in
Amsterdam.
He came to the United States in 1958 and designed a Dutch mill cafe for
the 1964 New York World's Fair.
He began to talk about his wartime experiences only when his daughters
convinced him that his grandchildren should know about them. In his
last years, he spoke to school groups.
Mr. Penraat's wife of 52 years, the former Jettie Jongejans, died three
years ago. He is survived by his daughters, Marjolijn de Jager, of
Stamford, Conn., Mir Lewis, of Mattituck, N.Y., and Noëlle, of
Manhattan; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
orpheus
deb...@comcast.net wrote:
> Jaap Penraat Dies at 88; Saved Hundreds in Holocaust
> By DOUGLAS MARTIN, NY Times
> Published: July 2, 2006
>
> Jaap Penraat, an architect and industrial designer who saved 406 Jews
> in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands by forging false documents and taking
> them to safety, died last Sunday at his home in Catskill, N.Y. He was
> 88.
Another true hero leaves us. It took real courage to do what Mr.
Penraat did.