
The love that continues on in the hearts of over six hundred Dutch Jewish children.

It is a story of the resilience of the human spirit. But it is not just a story of their courageous endeavors. Ingenious plans were implemented to remove children’s names from the registry of captured Jews to sneak them out of the college undetected past guards patrolling the deportation center, and to meld them in with their new families to avoid detection.īased on actual events, Over the Hedge is the story of how against escalating Nazi brutality when millions of Jews were disposed of in camps, Walter Süskind, Henriëtte Pimentel, and Johan van Hulst worked heroically with the Dutch resistance to save Jewish children. Working against irate orders from Hitler to rid the Netherlands of all Jews and increasing Nazi hostilities on the Resistance, the trio worked tirelessly to overcome barriers. From the college, the children were transported to live with Dutch families.

Heading the mission were Walter Süskind, a German Jew living in the Netherlands, Henriëtte Pimentel, a Sephardic Jew, and Johan van Hulst, principal of a Christian college.Īs Nazis rounded up Jewish families at gunpoint, the three discreetly moved children from the deportation center to the daycare across the street and over the backyard hedge to the college next door. I’m delighted to spotlight the WW2 novel ‘Over the Hedge’ by Paulette Mahurin today.ĭuring one of the darkest times in history, at the height of the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1943, members of the Dutch resistance began a mission to rescue Jewish children from the deportation center in Amsterdam.
