I am a design wonk. I love graphic design, I think, because out of all the visual arts, it is the one that lives right in the daily world of commerce. Some people put their design efforts into making logos for sick companies. Some people make fake IDs to save hundreds of lives. All hail graphic design.
Jaap Penraat Dies at 88; Saved Hundreds in Holocaust
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: July 2, 2006
Jaap Penraat, an architect and industrial designer who saved 406 Jews in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands by forging false documents and taking them to safety, died last Sunday at his home in Catskill, N.Y. He was 88. The cause was esophageal cancer, his daughter Noëlle Penraat said.
Mr. Penraat, whose first name is pronounced “yahp,” refused for many years to talk about his wartime experience. When he finally did, he simply said that he had done the decent thing.
“You do these things because in your mind there is no other way of doing it,” he said in an interview with The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2000.
He was imprisoned when his counterfeiting was discovered. He was tortured, but told his captors nothing. There were harrowing experiences as he shepherded Jews masquerading as construction workers across Europe.
Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to victims of the Holocaust, awarded Mr. Penraat the designation “Righteous Among the Nations” and put him on its honor roll in Jerusalem.
His medal carried this proverb: “He who saves a single human life saves the entire universe.”
Most Dutch Jews did not survive the Holocaust; of the 140,000 who lived there before the Nazis invaded on May 10, 1940, about 110,000 died. Only Poland lost a larger proportion of its Jewish population.
Jacob Penraat was born on April 11, 1918, in Amsterdam and studied design there. As a boy, he switched off lights for Jewish neighbors at sunset on Fridays, to help them avoid work, forbidden on the Sabbath.
He was a young architect and draftsman when Nazi occupiers took escalating measures against Jews. First, they were prohibited from being air-raid wardens, then barred from the civil service, then made to register.
A secret resistance formed to help them. Mr. Penraat, then in his 20’s and a nonpracticing Christian, marshaled his design talents to make fake identity cards. A friend married to a German gave him copies of official papers and stamps for models. He was soon discovered and went to prison for several months.
The situation for Jews worsened, and resistance cells raced to make false travel papers. But escaping the country was hard, because Germans controlled countries and seas bordering the Netherlands.
Mr. Penraat and his friends devised a plan to disguise Jews as construction workers for the wall that Hitler was building along France’s Atlantic Coast. He forged travel documents, using a real construction company’s letterhead.
He took the Jews to Lille, France, where he presented them to the French underground for transport to neutral Spain. He made about 20 trips, accompanying about 20 Jews each time.
Once, he approached German guards outside a school and told them his laborers needed lodging. He complained about the food, but called this “one of the first times a German Army played host to a bunch of Jews.”
Only one of the men moved by Mr. Penraat died, and that man was accidentally hit by a train. But Mr. Penraat trembled whenever he handed papers to a clerk.
“You’re there, a woman walks away and either she comes back with papers or she comes back with soldiers,” he said in an interview with The Poughkeepsie Journal. “And they would shoot you right then and there, so other people could see what happens when you do anything against the German Army.”
Hudson Talbott, a longtime friend of Mr. Penraat’s who wrote a children’s book about his experiences (“Forging Freedom: A True Story of Heroism During the Holocaust“) said his research indicated there was a daredevil aspect to the missions.
“The feeling I get is that he just loved the idea of putting one over on the Nazis,” Mr. Talbott said in an interview with The Albany Times Union. “It wasn’t a joke, or a game, but clearly there was something about fooling them that was an important aspect of this.”
After 1944, the trips were too risky, and Mr. Penraat hid in a village, subsisting on sugar beets. After the war, he became a noted designer in Amsterdam.
He came to the United States in 1958 and designed a Dutch mill cafe for the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
He began to talk about his wartime experiences only when his daughters convinced him that his grandchildren should know about them. In his last years, he spoke to school groups.
Mr. Penraat’s wife of 52 years, the former Jettie Jongejans, died three years ago. He is survived by his daughters, Marjolijn de Jager, of Stamford, Conn., Mir Lewis, of Mattituck, N.Y., and Noëlle, of Manhattan; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Update: this post had a Y!Q link that no longer works, because the Y!Q service was discontinued by Yahoo!. I preserve it here:
