Rescue of Jewish children
In 1942 van Hulst was the director of the Reformed Teacher Training College which educated elementary school teachers at Plantage Middenlaan 27, Amsterdam. Across the street at Plantage Middenlaan 24 was the Hollandse Schouwburg theatre, the main clearing site for the Jews living in Amsterdam who had been issued deportation notices by the Nazi government.
Children who arrived at the Schouwburg were separated from their families and sent to the neighbouring crèche at Plantage Middenlaan 31 run by Henriëtte Pimentel. The crèche shared a back garden with the college that Van Hulst directed.
Starting in January 1943, Pimentel and Walter Süskind, a German Jew who had been appointed by the Nazis to run the Hollandsche Schouwburg operation, began canvassing potential adoptive families for physical descriptions of children who could fit into their families without detection. Once the children's parents had agreed, the names of the children to be rescued were removed from the Nazi's registry of Jews who had passed through the Schouwburg theatre.
Then, working with Pimentel, Süskind and dozens of other volunteers, Van Hulst arranged for the children to be spirited over the hedge separating the neighbouring back yards of the crèche and the teachers' college, often assisted by the teachers-in-training or local university students. When the time came to move the rescued children and babies away from the school, they would be hidden in containers such as bags, sacks or laundry baskets.
Numerous methods were used to move the hidden children from the school. In one method, the operation's helpers would wait for the moment a tram passed, blocking the view of Nazi guards at the facing Hollandsche Schouwburg, to cycle away with the hidden child.
The operation came to a halt on 29 September 1943 when the Nazis sent Pimentel and 100 children from the crèche to Nazi concentration camps. Decades later, Van Hulst described his experience: "Now try to imagine 80, 90, perhaps 70 or 100 children standing there, and you have to decide which children to take with you. [...] That was the most difficult day of my life. [...] You know for a fact that the children you leave behind are going to die. I took 12 with me. Later on I asked myself: ‘Why not 13?'" Van Hulst thought twelve was the right number, otherwise the Germans would notice his plan and shut it down. In total, the operation had rescued between 500 and 1,000 Jewish babies and children.
Van Hulst received the Yad Vashem distinction in 1973. During a visit to the Netherlands in 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said of Van Hulst: "We say, those who save one life save a universe. You saved hundreds of universes. I want to thank you in the name of the Jewish people, but also in the name of humanity." Van Hulst replied, talking about the children he could not save: "I only can hope the angels may conduct them into paradise."
In 2016, the former Reformed Teacher Training College became the Dutch National Holocaust Museum.
Shortly before his 107th birthday in 2018, Van Hulst gave an interview on Dutch television, talking about his experiences during the war.
