One of the most daring rescue operations of World War II was spearheaded by an unlikely heroine: a Jewish daycare director.
When Nazis invaded the Netherlands and turned the theater across from her daycare into a detention center for Jewish families, Henriëtte Pimentel knew she had to act. Recruiting young women and teenagers from her staff, Pimentel became one of the linchpins in a bold, elaborate, underground network—one that smuggled Jewish children to safety right out from under the noses of the Nazis. Swapping dolls for babies, handing their wards over hedges, and bundling infants off in laundry baskets, Pimentel and her fellow Dutch resistors formed a rescue chain that prevented hundreds of children from meeting near-certain death in concentration camps. Her courage, and that of likeminded upstanders, lives on today through the survivors from her daycare and generations of their descendants.
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 yet least known acts of anti-Nazi resistance ever recorded.