I had a sister who was a year and a half older
than me, but we weren't alone.
We also had two other people in the house.
They were a Jewish couple.
They'd left Amsterdam toward the end of 1942
to go into hiding and they had a little daughter, Nita.
The daughter was sent to live somewhere else,
with another family.
Picked up a few months before they went into hiding,
because you didn't want to hide with your children,
because if one of you are caught and killed,
at least someone would be left in the family.
Our family doctor was Dr. Holtrop.
He knew most families because he would come into their homes
and deliver babies in their homes.
And he was a member of the Christian Reformed Church,
which is the basis for most
of the resistance fighters in the Netherlands.
This organization arranged for people
to develop identity cards which were false,
and facilitate finding families for them
and half of those people were caught and killed.
Holtrop came to our home and talked to my parents
about the possibility of doing that.
Now, it turns out, he himself had been put into a prison,
because they suspected he might
be working for the underground.
He was in prison for six months
and eventually released for lack of evidence.
Michel and Selly Nathans were a Jewish couple
who lived in the Jewish section of Amsterdam.
It's an area where other family members lived,
and they were very much concentrated there.
And in 1942, the Germans began a process
of taking Jews to Poland from the Netherlands.
The excuse was that it was for agricultural work.
Couple of months later, they were able to get a connection
to our family in Ermelo.
They came in the door and there was her mother holding
my sister Anita in her hands and smiling at them.
So, the settled in.
There was no idea at that time how long it was gonna be.
No sense that the war was gonna last
another two and a half years.
My parents had probably never met a Jewish person.
If they were ever caught they knew
that they would be taken to a concentration camp.
They were endangering their whole family.
Didn't seem to enter their mind very much.
They never really thought about that,
because they had, first of all,
faith that it was important to be there for other people
and especially they had a strong feeling
about Jews as God's people.
They decided to make a hole in the kitchen
under the kitchen floor and make a place underneath
where they put straw and put some bedding.
And so at night then, they started
staying underneath the floor.
They would lay carpet on top and then
put the table on top there.
So they would go underneath and stay there.
Who would look underneath a table?
Who would have any idea that they would be hiding there?
And very quickly they developed
kind of a kinship, they became a family.
My mother said, later on,
Sally became like a sister to her.
And my father became like a brother to him.
My parents grew up in families that read the Bible.
So they read the whole Bible from beginning to end,
the Old Testament and the New Testament.
So, the Jewish people sort of had
a special place in their heart
and of ours too because, every time we would have dinner
my father would read through the Bible
from beginning to end.
He was an intellectual Christian but also,
a really personal Christian.
For him, his faith was real.
He prayed every day.
He read the Bible every day.
And so his walk with the Lord was a very personal one.
Even when he was young.
And so, I'm sure it was a major motivation
for him throughout his life and for his concern for others
because after they came to America
they had a nursing home where they took care of people
and took special care of them.
It was high quality because, the concern they showed
for the Jewish people, they showed to people in general
all through their life.
They had been there for about a year
and my father was trying to stay in touch
with Nita and the family.
So he would take periodic trips on the train
to visit her to find out about what was going on.
He went and talked to Michel and said
for her birthday I'd like to bring Nita to her
and that was only a few weeks later.
And Michel said, "Yeah, I think that's a great idea.
"We'll make a surprise for Selly, we won't tell her."
So my father went back and picked up Nita.
Selly was upstairs waiting for the lunch
and then there was a knock on the door.
My mother opened the door and there was
Nita and my father had come on the trip.
And so Nita went up the stairs,
little steps going up the stairs,
and the door was open and there Selly saw Nita
for the first time in a whole year.
And you could imagine the emotion.
The emotion as they cried and hugged
and spent their time together.
And, they had a whole day together
and then it was time to say goodbye again.
Maybe never to see each other again.
'Cause who knows what would happen to her
and would happen to them.
Eventually they survived.
They were hoping that they would still find
their family and bring them back.
They discovered that they were all gone.
71 members of this family, all gone.
Parents, cousins, brothers, sisters, all except for one.
Coming to America people were free
to elevate people who were rescuers
and say, "Wow, that's pretty brave, you risked your lives
"for the sake of people you didn't know."
That was pretty amazing that my father and mother did that.
When I was born I was given the name of Paul,
which was a tradition in our family
to name your first born after
the grandfather and the great-grandfather.
So for many generations, the first son was named Paul.
So I was the first son.
I was named Paulus.
I was pretty important, I was important to the lineage
'cause I was gonna carry the name of my family on.
They were willing to sacrifice me, their son,
their Paulus, for the sake of this Jewish couple.
Because no way they were gonna let them go.
Even though they were gonna trade
four of us for two of them.
That didn't make any sense from
any kind of logical evolutionary perspective, right?
Why would you do that?
Why they did this, why would they lay down their life
for someone else is a question that I've asked many times.
They were willing to sacrifice themselves
and indeed there's an example in the Bible
of Jesus sacrificing himself for us.
And I think that in itself, that example,
may have been what inspired them to say,
hey, why should we not sacrifice ourself
for someone else in the same way
that Jesus sacrificed himself for us.
And so, at some point I started to realize
I could have been killed.
I was born and I could have died for them
and that was an important lesson
for some little kid, some teenager to learn.
And probably led me to go into psychology
to try to figure out things like that.
In the PhD program you really don't have
a whole lot of control except,
I was allowed to investigate what I liked.
So I started to study people.
It's an interesting question as to why people do bad things.
And as I became a psychologist and grew up
I said, "Why in the world haven't we
"learned our lessons from the Holocaust?
"Why are we still fighting, still having
"all these conflicts, still having massacres?"
Psychology has dealt with that
but hasn't solved the problem.
The only solution is really, the way of Jesus.
Of lifting people up above ourselves.
Only then, I think, will we as a people
in the world, come to peace with one another.
It's an amazing thing how people
so quickly can change from one personality
or one characteristic to the other.
They could easily push one way or the other.
So unless you have a strong foundation,
a really strong foundation and a strong faith
it's easy to be pushed one way or the other.
We can rationalize, well yes, but we have orders
we have to follow.
Or, these people well yeah, they're
the kind of people we get them out of the way.
It's not about relativism, not about well
let me see what's the best answer, what works.
It's about what's right, what the truth is
and I think there is a truth
and the truth for me is Jesus Christ.
My name is Prof. Paul Paulus
and I am ONE FOR ISRAEL!