Angels of Amsterdam (How a Band of Brave Women Outsmarted the Nazis to Save 600 Jewish Children)

For fans of Irena's Children and The Dressmakers of Auschwitz, the never-before-told story of a Jewish daycare director who led one of the most daring rescue operations of World War II, saving 600 children from the Netherlands' Nazi occupiers—“a rare story that reframes the Holocaust narrative from victimhood to heroism” (Mitch Albom).

Henriëtte Pimentel was an unlikely heroine. But when Nazi Germany invaded her native Holland and turned the theater next to her daycare into a detention center for Jewish families, she knew that she had to act. Recruiting young women and teenagers from her staff, Pimentel became the mastermind behind one of the boldest and most elaborate rescue operations of World War II, hiding and smuggling hundreds of children out of Amsterdam right under the noses of their Nazi captors—children who would have otherwise been deported to concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Sobibor. Armed with an array of clever tricks to deceive SS officers—trading baby dolls for children, handing their wards over hedges, and bundling them off in carts—Pimentel and her associates successfully saved as many of their charges as they could from near-certain death. Tragically, Pimentel herself would not survive: she, too, was eventually sent to her death. But her courage and that of her fellow resistors lives on in the survivors from her daycare, some of whom are in their 80s and 90s today.
 
Drawing on extensive research and original interviews with survivors and former teenage resistance workers, ANGELS OF AMSTERDAM is an astonishing true story of wartime solidarity and courage, immortalizing one of the most remarkable acts of anti-Nazi resistance ever recorded.