Ode to Truus Wijsmuller-Meijer | Resistance heroine

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That look behind the voile... This is a woman on a mission, who will not let anything or anyone throw her off balance. Truus Wijsmuller-Meijer was a resistance hero of unprecedented influence. She saved the lives of some 10,000 Jewish children with her child transports between 1938 and 1940. She also played an important role in the resistance during the occupation years. If anyone deserves an ode, it is her. She herself saw this very differently. At the end of her life, she said: ‘What I did was not enough. It was only about ten thousand children. How many millions died after that?'

She came from a reformed-liberal family and was active in the women's movement in Amsterdam from an early age. In 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, she became a staff member of the Committee for Jewish Refugees. After the open violence against Jews and their property in Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938), she decided to do all she could to save Jewish children from Germany and Austria from Nazi persecution. She personally knocked on Adolf Eichmann's door in Vienna, and got permission to evacuate 600 Jewish children to England - on condition that they left within five days.  It was an impossible task but she got it done. ‘Incredible, so purely Aryan and yet so tapped’ Eichmann is said to have said of her. But cynically, she did ‘help’ him with a logistical problem: he wanted the Jews gone. She wanted to save their lives.

It succeeded thanks to her large network in the Netherlands, Germany and England, combined with a hefty dose of persuasion and bluff.  That same day, Wijsmuller-Meijer reserved a number of trains with the Vienna railways. Five days later, she thus brought 600 children to the Netherlands, together with a group of helpers, most of whom were women. Most of the children - again accompanied - went straight from Hook of Holland to England, where they were taken in by a refugee committee. 

After proving her decisiveness with this first action, Eichmann authorised Wijsmuller-Meijer to book several trains weekly for the children's transports. With her helpers, she thus managed to flee over 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi territories. Via the Netherlands, the children's transports continued to England, the United States and other areas not occupied by the Nazis. Most of them survived the war, being the only ones from their families.

The refugee children knew her as Aunt Truus. For some of them, she managed to arrange temporary shelter in the Amsterdam Orphanage, where she was one of the administrators (later this building would become the Amsterdam Historical Museum). When the Germans attacked the Netherlands, on 10 May 1940, there were still 74 Jewish refugee children in the Burgerweeshuis. Aunt Truus and her supporters made every effort to get them to free England as soon as possible. They miraculously succeeded on 14 May 1940, the day the Netherlands capitulated. That day, the 74 Jewish children from the Burgerweeshuis left IJmuiden for England on the last ship to sail that day, the SS Bodegraven. Thanks to Truus Wijsmuller and her helpers, these children managed to survive the war.

After the war, she became a city councilor in Amsterdam. For the VVD, which was a different party back then when it comes to refugee policy. She got a small monument in Bachstraat and a bridge in Nieuw-West, but both are easily overlooked. Fortunately, for those searching, there is information about her in all sorts of places. In 2020, for example, Pamela Sturhoofd and Jessica van Tijn made the documentary “The Children of Truus. For this they interviewed a number of 'her' children, now in their nineties. Look at the documentary Truus' children.

For more information: https://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/vrouwenlexicon/lemmata/data/Meijer