14. The Teen Resistance Heroines
Dutch resistance heroines Truus and Freddie Oversteegen were born into a left-wing working-class family. They grew up in an industrial district north of Amsterdam known as the “Red Zone” for its residents’ political bent. In the 1930s, their parents 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 anti-fascist long before the Germans conquered the Netherlands in 1940, when Truus was sixteen years old and Freddie was fourteen.
When the Nazis began deporting the Netherlands’ Jews, the country’s communists and socialists came together in February of 1941 to lead a massive strike in protest. It was one of the few successful nationwide protests against the Germans, and it encouraged the rise of the Dutch resistance.
