← Back to the front page

These World War II Heroines Should be Household Names

Khalid Elhassan August 15, 2022 37 min

12. The Resistance Sisters

On September 5^th, 2018, Freddie Oversteegen, a Dutch Resistance heroine of WWII, passed in her nineties of a heart attack. She had been preceded into the afterlife two years earlier, in 2016, by her older sister, Truus, another resistance heroine in the fight against the Nazis. As part of their underground activities against the German occupiers, the Oversteegen sisters had risked their lives to circulate leaflets, help Jewish fugitives escape the Holocaust, and take out the occasional Nazi when the opportunity presented itself.

However, what was most remarkable about Truus and Freddie Oversteegen was not the cool courage they displayed as they put their necks on the lines to fight the Third Reich. Nor was it the fact that they were a sibling resistance team. While those were remarkable aspects, what stood out the most about them was that they did what they did while they were still teenagers. Truus was only sixteen when she joined the Dutch Resistance, while Freddie was just fourteen when she became an antifascist combatant.

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.