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Historic Figures Who Set Out to Save Jews From the Holocaust

Khalid Elhassan December 15, 2020 32 min

Hanns Albin Rauter - World War II — A Dutch Resistance cell during WWII. For God and Country

4. This Resistance Heroine Grew Up in an Antifascist Home That Sheltered Fugitives From the Nazis

German roundup of Jews in the Netherlands. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Dutch Resistance Heroine Truus Menger-Oversteegen was born into a left-wing working-class family in 1923. She grew up in an industrial district north of Amsterdam known as the “Red Zone” for its residents’ political bent. Before WWII, her family actively assisted an organization known as Red Aid, which helped save Jewish and political refugees from the Nazis by facilitating their escape from Germany.

Truus grew up accustomed to fugitives hiding in her home from Dutch police, who were likely to return them to the German border and hand them to the dreaded Gestapo. She was thus already an antifascist long before the Germans conquered the Netherlands in 1940, when Truus was fifteen-years-old.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.