Johan van Hulst, The Hero That Saved 600 Kids From The Holocaust, Dies At 107

Johan van Hulst was a hero. He risked his life saving more than 600 Jewish kids from tortures and death during the Holocaust.

The courageous Dutchman has recently passed away at the age of 107. He will forever be remembered for his memorable selflessness and risking his life to rescue others.

To learn what life would've been like for those kids had they not been rescued, watch the video below. You will hear Ron Jones, who has been in Auschwitz and survived to narrate his story:

Johan van Hulst used to live in Amsterdam during the Second World War and work as the headmaster of a Protestant school. That school shared a garden hedge with a nursery, the place where Nazis kept Jewish kids. Those children weren't sent to concentration camps because they were too young.

These kids were all under the age of 12 and taken from their families. They would be taken to the concentration camps eventually to endure tortures and certain death.

When the nursery was too full, the Nazis used to place kids in Hulst's school. In cooperation with the women who worked in the nursery, sometimes other children were smuggled over the shared hedge into the school.

Hulst then hid the kids in laundry baskets and sacks to transport them away from the region and into safe places and new houses. He, and some others who were part of this scheme, located some families willing to take in these kids, allowing them to escape to safety without attracting Nazis' attention.

This was unbelievably dangerous and getting caught would've meant certain death for Hulst. To avoid capture, he didn't declare all of the kids in his school on official documents. By writing down fewer names of children, some could pass through undetected.

Nevertheless, in 1945, before the war ended, an associate blew Hulst's cover, so he was forced to go into hiding. Several years later, the Netherlands recognized him as a hero, and he even served in the country's Senate between the years 1956 and 1981.

Finally, in 2012, Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, officially recognized Johan van Hulst as Righteous Among The Nations. That's an honor given to non-Jewish people that risked their lives during the Second World War to rescue Jewish lives.

"We say, those who save one life save a universe," Netanyahu said to Hulst while visiting the Netherlands for the ceremony. "You saved hundreds of universes. I want to thank you in the name of the Jewish people, but also in the name of humanity."

The Netherlands has 5,000 people who've received the accolade of Righteous Among The Nations. Only Poland has earned more.

Even though Hulst died in Amsterdam on March 22, 2018, he said that his only regret was not being able to rescue more of the kids from the nursery. Several years before his death, he also said, "I actually only think about what I have not been able to do. To those few thousand children that I could not have saved."

Johan van Hulst was indeed a selfless man, risking his own life to rescue others'. How many of us would honestly say we'd have done the same? The impact he's made in the world is immeasurable. He'll always be remembered as a hero. Rest in Peace.