11. These Young Resistance Heroines Were Committed Antifascists Even Before the Germans Occupied Their Country
Truus and Freddie Oversteegen were 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. In the 1930s, their parents 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. In their youth, the sisters grew accustomed to fugitives hiding in their household from Dutch police, who were likely to deport and hand them over to the Gestapo at the border.
The pair were thus already antifascist long before the Germans conquered the Netherlands in 1940, when Truus was sixteen-years-old and Freddie was fourteen. When the Nazis began to deport Dutch Jews, the occupied country’s communists and socialists came together in February, 1941, to lead a massive strike in protest. It was one of the few successful nationwide protests against the Germans. In response, the Nazis ramped up their repression and brutality in order to cow the occupied Dutch into obedience and force them to toe the line. The occupiers’ repression further alienated even more Dutch people, and drove them into the arms of the resistance.