Lydia and Johannes Huygens
Lydia and Johannes Huygens were a Dutch couple who lived in Utrecht. For two and a half years during the war, the Huygens hid 5 Jews in their apartment, just across the road from a police station which functioned as the Gestapo headquarters.

During the round-up of Dutch Jews in the summer of 1942, the Huygens took in their Jewish neighbours, a woman and her daughter. The Dutch Underground later helped Johannes rescue the husband from a forced labour camp. "We always had to keep the blinds down," said Johannes, "or they would have been able to see right into our apartment." When danger threatened, the little group would go either down to the basement or up through the back of a wardrobe to a hiding place upstairs.

Lydia & Johannes Huygens in 1940

Johannes, a hairdresser by profession, traded with local farmers for the much-needed extra food for his hidden Jews. When the Huygens' apartment block was bombed, he relocated the Jews to safe houses through his contacts in the Underground.

Both Jewish families survived the war and have kept in contact with each other ever since. The Huygens moved to Sydney and one of the Jewish families moved to New Zealand. Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands presented the Huygenses with medals and a citation from the Dutch government in 1988. In a ceremony at the Great Synagogue in Sydney in 1989 the Israeli consul honoured the Huygenses as Righteous Among the Nations. Johannes Huygens passed away in 1995.

Read the full story in Huygens, J. (1996) Opposite the Lion's Den:The Story of Hiding Dutch Jews, Sydney, Brandl & Schlesinger