My Tante (Aunt) Bep, my father’s sister, passed away in 2015 at 97, having lived a remarkable life. Newly married when Holland was occupied by the Nazis in World War II, she and my Uncle Bob decided in 1942 to hide two Jewish children from transport to the Nazi death camps...
She wrote a short history for family members. There was a constant threat of exposure. The German once came to the house to round up young men for the factories in Germany… 
My father, 16, narrowly escaped by leaping out of a second floor window. That also distracted the German soldiers from discovering the children, who were brother and sister…
The Dutch underground supplied illegal meal coupons to keep the children fed. There are many other harrowing tales, involving forged medical documents and bluffing German officers when my father’s brother, my uncle and my grandfather were rounded up at various moments….
My aunt became pregnant with her first child. Yet the two children stayed hidden and survived the war. Through some lucky circumstances, their father (who had joined the Allied invasion) found out where they were hidden….
The reunion was captured by a military aide and one of the photographs was published last year in the New York Times….nytimes.com/interactive/20…
The children grew up to be adults and the sister is still alive, with three children and many grandchildren. My aunt and uncle, for saving them, are listed as Righteous Among the Nations in Yad Vashem….
My aunt and uncle were always modest about what they did. It was simply something they thought was right — a human act of kindness in the face of tyranny. That’s how evil is defeated — one small step at a time.
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