Run Hiding Places

The Jewish community in the Netherlands was hit harder than anywhere else. No other country had such a high proportion of its Jewish population deported and then murdered. The Nazis used intimidation and terror. Many people were scared off by this but some still took a stand against injustice, not knowing that this injustice had extended to mass murder on an industrial scale. These were people who risked their lives for their principles, who believed the lives of strangers were as valuable as their own.Johannes Post, a deeply religious farmer from Drenthe, was one of them, a leading figure in the national underground movement. He had set up an impressive organization in and around his farm for hiding people. In 1944 he was caught and executed by firing squad. Over a year before his death, Johannes had handed over the management of his organization for hiding people to an unlikely duo: the thirty-eight-year-old son of a Protestant minister and an eighteen-year-old Jewish boy, the older a fiery man, the younger more circumspect. They were both in hiding themselves. This book is about those two men who came out of their safe hiding places to save the lives of hundreds of other people. They were modest heroes in incomprehensible times.