13. Repression Fuels the Resistance
In response to widespread protests and the budding resistance, the Nazis ramped up their repression and brutality in order to cow the occupied Dutch into obedience and toeing the line. The occupiers’ repression further alienated even more Dutch people, and drove them into the arms of the resistance.
By then, the Oversteegen sisters’ parents had divorced. Their father, an activist committed to political causes but not committed as much to family obligations, hardly brought in any money, and had the family living on a moored ship. His wife eventually got fed up, left, took the girls with her, and filed for divorce. As Freddie recalled decades later, it was not an acrimonious divorce, and her father sang them a French farewell song from the bow of the ship as they left. The mother arranged to live in a modest apartment, in which she and her daughters slept on straw mattresses that she had made herself.
