‘Her war never stopped’: the Dutch teenager who resisted the Nazis. RIP Freddie Oversteegen
The first thing the
Nazis took from Freddie Oversteegen was her bed. Her mother, Trijn, a
communist bringing up her children independently in the Dutch city of Haarlem,
sheltered Jews, dissidents and gay people as they fled Germany in the 1930s.
Oversteegen, who was seven when Adolf Hitler came to power, bunked in with her
big sister Truus to make room.
It was the start of a
struggle that would last until she died on 5 September, the day before her 93rd
birthday, in a nursing home not far from where, as teenagers, she and Truus
carried out a campaign of assassinations and sabotage against Nazi invaders
with pistols hidden in their bicycle baskets.
“If you ask me, the
war only ended two weeks ago,” her son Remi Dekker told the Observer.
“In her mind it was still going on, and on, and on. It didn’t stop, even until
the last day.”
Oversteegen’s war
began one Friday in May 1940 with planes roaring overhead and the smell of
smoke. Realising the Nazis had invaded the Netherlands, her
family began burning their radical literature. Oversteegen, then 14, and Truus,
16, were already used to smuggling refugees and distributing forbidden texts.
It wasn’t long before the resistance came to recruit them. Her mother only gave
them one rule, Oversteegen once recalled: “Always stay human.”
Oversteegen was
petite, and with her twin plaits she easily passed for 12. Her innocent looks
made her invaluable as she could slip by Nazi controls unnoticed. The two
sisters began as couriers, moving weapons and stealing identity papers to help
Jewish people escape. One early assignment
was arson – the two burned down a Nazi warehouse, flirting with the guards as a
distraction. Soon, they were taken to an underground potato shed and taught how
to shoot. Their method was the Dutch equivalent of a drive-by. “My mother drove
the bicycle, and Freddie sat on the back and was shooting,” recalled Truus’s
daughter, Hannie Menger. “Because they were girls, nobody noticed them.”... read more:
