Dutch teacher and trained nurse who during the Second World War headed a crèche in Amsterdam which cared for small children while their parents were otherwise occupied. Together with Walter Süskind and Johan van Hulst, from around October 1942 she helped to save the lives of hundreds of Jewish infants by smuggling them into the homes of sympathetic host families.
Henriëtte Henriquez Pimentel was the youngest daughter of the diamond cutter Nathan Henriquez Pimentel (1837–1893) and Rachel Oppenheimer (1841–1929). Together with her still living seven siblings (she was #13, 5 other siblings died as infants), she was brought up in a well-to-do Portuguese-Jewish family. After following a teachers training course, in the 1920s she worked as a governess and a kindergarten teacher in Bussum.
As she had also trained as a nurse, in 1926 she was appointed director of the Vereeniging Zuigelingen-Inrichting en Kindertehuis (Crèche and Kindergarten Institute) in Amsterdam. Founded with support from a Jewish legacy, it was a large, well-fitted modern establishment on the Plantage Middenlaan which accommodated up to a hundred infants and toddlers who were cared for by a team of mainly Jewish staff.
Henriëtte lived in the crèche building. The (pupil) childcare workers received thorough internal training before they were allowed to care for around one hundred babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers. With her short gray haircut and invariably dressed in a white jacket, ‘Miss’ Pimentel looked like a paragon of order – it was not without reason that she was called ‘the director’. She always had her dog Brunie (Brownie) with her. Pimentel was progressive, cheerful, cordial and loved, both with her assistants, who, according to the pedagogical ideas of Friedrich Fröbel and Maria Montessori, encouraged them to be ‘a child with the child’, as well as with the often impoverished parents from the Amsterdam Jewish quarter.
In 1941, as a result of the German occupation, Pimentel was forced to dismiss her non-Jewish colleagues. By autumn 1942, the crèche had become a hostel accommodating Jewish children whose parents were taken to the Hollandsche Schouwburg on the other side of the street. Once a theatre, it had been converted into a centre for Jews scheduled for deportation to the Westerbork transit camp.
The children in the crèche were also to be sent to Westerbork. In collaboration with Walter Süskind at the Jewish Council and Johan van Hulst who ran the neighbouring teachers training college, Pimentel made arrangements for as many as possible to be smuggled out´to families willing to look after them, some as far away as Friesland or Limburg. For several months the scheme went undetected as the children’s names were removed from the transport schedules. Some of them were temporarily housed in the teachers training college while others were cared for by student groups or other resistance cells. Some sources estimate that up to a thousand were saved in this way, others around 500, but the large majority continued to be deported. The operation was code-named “N.V.”, short for Naamloze Vennootschap meaning “limited company”.
On July 23, 1943, the Germans unexpectedly evacuated the day care center. All children and their caregivers had to go on transport. One of the caretakers was able to escape and hid the loft. Through a crack, she saw how the day care center had been emptied: ‘At the end, only Brunie, the director’s dog, walked through the dormitory. That was the end of director Pimentel, she told about the fatal day after the war.
Henriëtte Pimentel was transferred to camp Westerbork. There she wrote instructions on how to set up a new daycare center after the war. After a month and a half, she had to be transported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered around September 17, 1943, 67 years old.
Thanks in part to the courage and ingenuity of Henriette Pimentel, the resistance was able to let hundreds of Jewish children escape and go into hiding in a few months – many survived the war. The crèche was closed shortly after the last deportations (September 1943). Immediately after the war, in 1946, the board of the Association of Nursing Home and Children’s Home renamed the nursery in Huize Henriëtte as a tribute to Miss Pimentel . In April 1950, at the opening of Huize Henriëtte in a new building on Sarphatistraat (no. 26), Mayor d’Ailly considered her dedication extensively. The special role of Pimentel has been addressed in various publications and exhibitions about ‘children’s work’ in the war around the Hollandsche Schouwburg and the daycare center. In the war film Süskind by Rudolf van de Berg (2011), the actress Olga Zuiderhoek plays the role of Henriëtte Pimentel.
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