A 91-year-old Dutch man who was honored with Israel’s Righteous Among the Nations medal for rescuing a Jewish boy during WWII, has returned the award, after he learnt his six relatives were killed in the Gaza strip by an Israeli missile. The man, Henk Zanoli, sent the medal back to the place where he received it – the Israeli Embassy in The Hague, explaining in a letter attached that it wasn’t an easy decision for him. “It is with great sorrow that I am herewith returning the medal I received as an honor and a token of appreciation from the State of Israel,” reads the letter, published by Haaretz on Friday. Zanoli and his late mother, Johana Zanoli-Smit, were honored by the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in 2011 for having saved a Jewish child, Elhanan Pinto, born in 1932, during the Nazi occupation of Holland. The family hid the boy, whose parents were sent to German concentration camps, from 1943 to 1945. By doing so, the Zanoli family put themselves at serious risk, as they had already been under scrutiny from the Nazis for opposing the occupation. “Against this background it is particularly shocking and tragic that today, four generations on, our family is faced with the murder of our kin in Gaza. Murder carried out by the State of Israel,” Zanoli wrote to Ambassador Haim Davon.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 05:29:33 +0000