Hetty Voûte

Her brother, Paul Antoine Voûte, M.D. (1906–1971), who had been a respected physician in The Hague at the start of World War II and was imprisoned for helping Hetty Voûte with her child rescue activities during the war, continued to practice medicine, was declared with his wife, Margaret to be Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem on 28 March 2012.

Henriëtte (Hetty) Voûte died in Amsterdam, the Netherlands on 16 January 1999.

Henriëtte ("Hetty") Voûte (1918–1999) was a Dutch Resistance fighter who was declared Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem on 24 March 1988 for her work rescuing Dutch Jewish children whose parents had been deported to Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

On 24 March 1988 she was declared to be Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, and a tree was planted in her honor in The Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem. During her address at the tree planting ceremony, she noted:

Jan Reinier Voûte (1908–1993), who was the third of the Voûte children and had been a lawyer with Amsterdam firm of Loeff and Van der Ploeg, Lawyers & Notaries prior to the war, went on to serve as a member of the Provincial States of North Holland from 1966 to 1980, and as a member of the Senate of the States General from 1976 to 1980. Chairman of the foundation supporting Amsterdam's Rembrandt House Museum, he also founded and chaired the Dutch-Indonesia Society, and was knighted on 21 September 1978 as an officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau.

Her brother, Jan Lodewijk Voûte (1904–1962), who was the oldest of the Voûte children, was known by friends and family as "Lodie," and was one of the two Voûte brothers who co-published a Dutch Resistance newspaper during World War II (an activity for which he was ultimately arrested and imprisoned by Nazi officials), went on to become a Dutch diplomat. Assigned to posts in Madrid, Spain; Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil; The Hague; and Santiago, Chile, he was appointed as the Netherlands' ambassador to Chile in 1960 – a position he held until his death there from heart disease on 24 October 1962. His remains were returned to the Netherlands for interment at the General Cemetery in Noordwijk on 5 November 1962.

On 16 December 1946 Hetty Voûte began a new life when she wed Christian Elie Dutilh (1923–1989) in Utrecht. Following their marriage, the couple relocated to the Dutch East Indies, where they greeted the arrival of two sons and two daughters. When Hetty contracted tuberculosis again in 1953, the family returned to the Netherlands, making their home in Amsterdam's Prinses Marijkestraat. She and her husband divorced in 1972. Hetty Voûte then became a biology teacher at the Huishoudschool in Amsterdam, a position she held for eight years. In her later years, she was a resident of Amsterdam who lived "in an elegant apartment on one of the loveliest streets in the city, just a few blocks from the Anne Frank House".

Forced to "sit on a pile of coal for two days and two nights in the rain," said Voûte, they realized once they were finally allowed in that their living conditions would be abysmal. Required to stand for hours during the morning and evening "Appell" as prisoners names were checked against camp rosters, they were often beaten during those reviews. Assigned to a work detail at the Siemens factory, they were given only "watery soup with some cabbage in it" for lunch, "and for dinner, more soup and a piece of hard bread." At night, they slept on "hard mattresses filled with a little fetid straw" in dirty, lice-infested barracks. The conditions then deteriorated further. By 1945, as awareness dawned that Germany would lose the war, the guards stopped feeding the surviving prisoners, and ramped up their mass extermination efforts

Following negotiations by Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, Hetty Voûte, Gisela Wieberdink-Soehnlein, and other inmates were finally freed from Ravensbrück on 28 April 1945. Given fresh bread and lentil soup by representatives from the International Red Cross, they were also given medical care before being transported by van, train and ferry to Malmö. Initially not permitted to return to the Netherlands due to a severe food shortage there and because she still had not yet fully recovered from the effects of her concentration camp imprisonment, she was hospitalized at Landskrona before being transferred to Lidingö, a sanatorium near Stockholm when physicians discovered she had contracted tuberculosis. She was finally permitted to return home in April 1946.Voûte, Henriette, Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands.

Under increasing scrutiny by Nazi sympathizers, she was forced to go into hiding in February 1943 for personal safety reasons, but resumed her rescue and resistance work within weeks, deeming the lives of the children she was helping as important as, or more important than her own. Arrested in June 1943 for her rescue work as a member of the Utrechts Kindercomité (Utrecht Children’s Committee or UKC), she was incarcerated, and moved from one jail to another until being transferred to the detention camp at Herzogenbusch in Vught. She was then later deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. Surviving until the camp was liberated, she returned home to the Netherlands, married and had children.

As awareness built of her rescue work, Hetty Voûte came under increasing scrutiny by Dutch and Nazi officials. After nearly being arrested in February 1943, she was forced to temporarily halt her activities and go into hiding, staying with Adrie Knappert in Ommen, Overijssel immediate for several weeks until the immediate danger passed. During the summer of 1943, her luck finally ran out. When she went to the Utrecht train station to retrieve her bicycle on the evening of 12 June, she was arrested there by the Geheime Staatspolizei (the Nazi Secret State Police unit known more commonly as the Gestapo), and sent to jail. Her friend and fellow UKC collaborator, Gisela Wieberdink-Soehnlein, was then also arrested and jailed the next day.

In response to the persecution and deportation of Jewish men and women from the Netherlands (including the July 1942 mass deportation from Amsterdam to the Auschwitz and Sobibor) concentration camps, she then joined the Utrechts Kindercomité (Utrecht Children’s Committee or UKC), and became involved with child rescue on a significantly larger scale:

According to Yad Vashem, just prior to beginning the massive July 1942 action in Amsterdam, Nazi authorities and their Dutch collaborators had designated the Hollandse Schouwberg, a Jewish Theater there, as the main holding area for the targeted families. As the round up progressed, children were separated from their parents and moved across the street to "the Crèche – what had been a day care center for the children of mostly Jewish working mothers." The parents were then taken to the Nazi transit camp at Westerbork, and held there until transported by cattle car to a death camp. As soon as they were safely able to make their way into the Crèche, Hetty Voûte and Gisela Wieberdink-Soehnlein, a Utrech University law student, began a series of rescue visits, during which they hid at-risk children in laundry bags, milk cans and potato sacks, smuggled them out of the building, and transported them to UKC support families. Between 1942 and 1943, Voûte and Wieberdink-Soehnlein collaborated with Henriette Pimentel, headmistress of the Crèche, Dr. Johan Van Hulst, director of a nearby teachers’ seminary, and Walter Süskind, and to save 1,000 of the roughly 4,000 at-risk children.

By the summer of 1942, Hetty Voûte was also actively engaged in procuring ration cards for the increasing number of Jewish children being sheltered through the UKC's support network. Among her suppliers was Menachem Pinkhof, one of the Jewish members of the Westerweel group. She then also began traveling throughout the Netherlands to secure additional cards, and built a secure supply network by convincing officials at 12 distribution centers to authorize the issuance of ration cards in conjunction with each UKC child's registration papers. By November 1942, she was in charge of the UKC’s administration, and was responsible for safeguarding the codebook which documented the names and addresses of the Jewish children being hidden by the UKC. She also escorted children to their respective safehouses and, when no hiding places were available, found temporary shelters for children in need. Also participating in this network was Willemiena Bouwman (known as Mien van Trouw), and Bouwman's love interest, Willem Pieter (“Wim”) Speelman, one of the organizers of Trouw (“True” or “Allegiance”), an orthodox Protestant underground newspaper which was published illegally in violation of Nazi laws prohibiting the free operation of independent press outlets

Close to her family, Hetty Voûte opted to live at home while studying biology at Utrecht University since the academic institution was located not far from her parents' house on Kromme Nieuwe Gracht. Her ordered world was upended in 1940, however, when Germany invaded the Netherlands on May 10 and when her nation surrendered after five days of brutal fighting:

By autumn 1940 she and a classmate, Olga Hudig, had relocated to the village of Noordwijk in South Holland in order to conduct research as part of the requirements for a university class in marine biology. While obtaining the requisite permission from a local government official to conduct her research (because beach access was restricted by Nazi authorities at this time), she noticed "a very nice map showing the locations of all the anti-aircraft guns on that strip of land," and realized that she could help by alerting members of a local Dutch Resistance cell to the map's contents and location:

After completing her studies at the Stedelijk Gymnasium, she enrolled as a biology major in 1937 at Utrecht University, a state-sponsored academic institution in the Netherlands. It was during this period of her life that she and her family began to hear stories regarding the increase of Antisemitism in Germany. These stories were confirmed by her brother in 1938. An employee of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines who was in Germany for a work assignment in November of that year, he had been an eyewitness to the violence perpetrated against Jewish people by supporters of Adolf Hitler as part of Kristallnacht, a pogrom which took place on 9–10 November, during which the Sturmabteilung (the German paramilitary force known more commonly as the "SA") destroyed synagogues and Jewish-owned stores and other buildings, murdered more than 90 Jewish people, and deported 30,000 Jewish men to Nazi concentration camps. That same year, Hetty Voûte became a member of the Red Cross.

Born on 12 June 1918 in Utrecht, in the Netherlands, Henriëtte (Hetty) Voûte was the youngest of seven children of Pauline Hermine Elisabeth (Pierson) Voûte (1881–1965) and Paul Antoine Voûte, Jr. (1877–1946), a native of the village of Glowaczow in Poland who had emigrated from Warsaw aboard the M.S. Batory, and had become a factory director in Utrecht. Her siblings were: Jan Lodewijk Voûte (1904–1962), who was also known as “Lodie”; Paul Antoine Voûte (1906–1971); Jan Reinier Voûte (1908–1993); Allard Voûte (1910–1974); Nicolaas Gerard Voûte (1913–1998); and Pauline Hermine Elisabeth Voûte (1916–1979).