Truus Oversteegen
Truus Oversteegen was born into a left-wing working-class family, and grew up in an industrial district north of Amsterdam known as the “Red Zone” for its residents’ political bent. Her family actively assisted an organization known as Red Aid, which helped Jewish and political refugees escape Nazi Germany to the safety of the Netherlands and beyond before the war. In her youth, Truus grew accustomed to fugitives hiding in the Oversteegen household from Dutch police, who were likely to hand them to the Gestapo at the border. She was thus antifascist long before the Germans conquered the Netherlands in 1940, when Truus was 15 years old.
At age 16, she joined the Dutch Resistance, and started off by distributing leaflets and illegal newspapers, and offering assistance to fugitives from the occupiers. In 1941, following a massive Dutch workers’ strike to protest the deportation of Jews, the Nazis cracked down hard. That further radicalized Truus, and spurred her to join an armed partisan fighter cell that engaged in direct action against the Germans.
After receiving military training and learning how to operate a firearm, Truus’ early assignments included flirting with and seducing German soldiers, and leading them into the woods where they would be killed by her comrades. Before long, the teenager was shooting Germans herself, and rigging up bridges and railroad tracks with explosives for destruction.
Life as an armed partisan would prove a difficult row to hoe, full of dangers and marked by tragedy as often as success. Early on, she was present at a failed rescue mission of Jewish children that ended with the fugitives caught in searchlights in an open field, where most were mown down with machine guns. Before the war was over, many of her Resistance comrades were arrested and executed. Suspicion was rife that Truus’ and other left-wing cells had been deliberately betrayed by right-wing members of the Resistance, who were backward in the actual fight, but came forward at the hour of liberation to claim the lion’s share of the credit.
Notwithstanding the setbacks and daily dangers, she courageously soldiered on and kept up the fight, evading capture despite a sizeable reward that was placed on her head. After the war, Truus Oversteegen put down her arms and beat swords into plowshares, raised a family and went on to make a name for herself as a respected artist and sculptress, and as a public speaker at war memorial services.
Read More: Resistance Fighters from World War I & II.