Alan Chartock Interviews Jaap Penraat

Alan Chartock interviews Jaap PenraatAlan's interview Jaap Penraat, a Dutch man who risked his own life to save 406 Jews during World War II.

February 20th, 1940, Amsterdam: The Nazis round up 425 Jewish men and send them to Mauthausen concentration camp where most will die. This act of aggression prompted a young Dutch gentile, Jaap Penraat, to develop a complicated but ingenious scheme with which to save the Jews of Holland from the Nazis. By the end of the War, Penraat, a draftsman, ended up saving over 400 Jews by forging their working papers - with these papers, the Jews could legally travel into France under the laws of the Third Reich.

June 11th, 1998, New York City: Jaap Penraat was awarded the Medal of the Righteous by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Heroes and Martyrs Remembrance Authority. According to the Israeli Consul General, "his name shall be forever engraved on the Honor Wall in the Garden of the Righteous, at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem".

Today, Jaap lives in the Catskills of New York State, where one of his neighbors, Hudson Talbott, after hearing about his tale of heroism, decided to write a children's book about his story called,Forging Freedom: A True Story of Heroism During the Holocaust.

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