10. Despite Their Poverty, These Sisters’ Family Harbored and Sheltered Fugitives from Nazi Oppression
By the time the Dutch felt the heavy hand of the German occupiers, the Oversteegen sisters’ parents had divorced. Their father was an activist committed to political causes, but not committed as much to family obligations. He 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. The family lived in straitened financial conditions, exacerbated even further by the hardships and shortages of wartime and of life under German occupation. However, they managed to get by. Their mother also continued the family’s tradition of harboring fugitives from oppression, and hid a Jewish couple in their apartment during the war. As Freddie recalled years later, that confused her at first: the Jewish couple were capitalists, while the Oversteegens were committed communists.
