Yap Penraat

Yap Penraat (born on April 11th, 1918 in Amsterdam, Netherlands; died on June 25th, 2006 in New York) was an interior designer, sculpture, architect (for tiles and statues), and a Dutch resistance fighter during World War II. Penraat always had respect for the Jews; ever since he was a child he would switch the lights for Shabbat, which was forbidden to do for a Jew at the time. He started his resistance activities when the Nazis first started to occupy the Netherlands. He began by taking a risk and forging identity papers for the Jews, which led him to several months of imprisonment. Though, that did not stop him, and he successfully smuggled 406 people from the Netherlands and led them to safety in Spain. He did this via France; he used his forgery skills to convince France that the Jews were slave laborers for the Atlantic Wall and only lost one man in the process. With sacrifice came hardship; he was tortured by the Nazis, but revealed nothing of his effort. Once he was released he continued his activities, but it became too risky and he went into hiding for the remainder of the war. After the war, he moved to America and started to tell of his experiences, with the convincing of his daughters to let the world know about his heroism. Yap Penraats commitment to guiding those Jews to safety paid off and was awarded the designation of: “The Righteous among the Nations” in 1988. Penraat was one of the small minorities that recognized that the Jews were like everyone else and that they had rights. Yap Penraat and all of the other Righteous of the Nations taught us to believe in the equality of all human beings and that anyone can make a difference.