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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsResisting Nazis, He Saw Need for Israel. Now He Is Its Critic.
THE HAGUE In 1943, Henk Zanoli took a dangerous train trip, slipping past Nazi guards and checkpoints to smuggle a Jewish boy from Amsterdam to the Dutch village of Eemnes. There, the Zanoli family, already under suspicion for resisting the Nazi occupation, hid the boy in their home for two years. The boy would be the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.
Seventy-one years later, on July 20, an Israeli airstrike flattened a house in the Gaza Strip, killing six of Mr. Zanolis relatives by marriage. His grandniece, a Dutch diplomat, is married to a Palestinian economist, Ismail Ziadah, who lost three brothers, a sister-in-law, a nephew and his fathers first wife in the attack.
On Thursday, Mr. Zanoli, 91, whose father died in a Nazi camp, went to the Israeli Embassy in The Hague and returned a medal he received honoring him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations non-Jews honored by Israel for saving Jews during the Holocaust. In an anguished letter to the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands, he described the terrible price his family had paid for opposing Nazi tyranny.
My sister lost her husband, who was executed in the dunes of The Hague for his involvement in the resistance, he wrote. My brother lost his Jewish fiancée who was deported, never to return.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/world/middleeast/henk-zanoli-israel-gaza-holocaust-ziadah.html?_r=0
U4ikLefty
(4,012 posts)much respect to Mr. Zanoli
BillZBubb
(10,650 posts)Because anyone who criticizes Israel has to be.
Uncle Joe
(58,426 posts)Thanks for the thread, Galraedia.
malaise
(269,186 posts)Great man