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Joop Westerweel (Rescuer) Joop Westerweel was a resistance leader and a rescuer. He was born on January 1, 1889 and died August 11, 1944. He was born in Holland. He was a Dutch teacher with Mirjam Pinkhof. Joop was head of the Westerweel Group. He and his fellow rescuers helped Jews during the Holocaust. He created an underground movement to hide kids and help them to not be deported. People had found out where he had been hiding them, so they created escape routes through Belgium and France, and then Switzerland and Spain. They saved 300 to 400 lives. Joop was caught by the Germans while he was trying to sneak to young children over the Dutch border into Belgium. He didn’t make it so he was sent to the concentration camp at Vught. He was tortured there but didn’t say anything about his other helpers. Then he was executed in Vught Concentration Camp. Before he had died, he wished the Jews well and that they should build Palestine into a place where there would be no war, only food and work for everyone. A few years after that, a forest was planted in Israel in his name in 1954.

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