Truus Wijsmullermeijer

Vocation

Notable

Traits

Dutch social worker, resistance fighter during WWII, who with others involved with Kindertransport, saved more than 10,000 Jewish children. She was the daughter of Jacob Meijer and Bertha Hendrika Boer, who owned a drugstore in Alkmaar. She attended the School of Commerce. After WWI her parents fostered Austrian children in their home. Her parents taught her to "always help those people who really deserve and need it, no matter the colour of their skin or their religion", she would later recall. In 1912 the family moved to Duivendrecht. Two years later she got her first job at a bank, where she met her husband. On 30 March 1922 she married the bank employee Johannes Franciscus Wijsmuller (25 February 1894, Amsterdam - 31 December 1964, Amsterdam) in Amsterdam. The couple got no children and her physician she consulted for it, advised her to become a social worker. So she did. She was befriended with Adrienne Minette (Mies) Boissevain-van Lennep (21 September 1896 3 AM A'dam - 18 February 1965), whom she knew from the "Vereeniging voor Vrouwenbelangen en Gelijk Staatsburgerschap" (VVGS, Association for Women's Interests and Equal Citizenship). Since 10 December 1933, "Auntie Truus" as the children called her, arranged with Mies Boissevain and others, children's transports for the Committee for Special Jewish Interests. These transports eventually saved 10,000 Jewish children from Germany and Austria, on a route via the Netherlands to the UK. After her visit to Nazi Germany a few days after the Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938), she decided to scale up her efforts. Hitler was not joking at all about the Jews and lifes were at risk. One of the most spectacular transports, the first, followed her meeting with Adolf Eichmann, head of emigration affairs, with whom she tried to negotiate about the number of Jewish children to be rescued. Eichmann did not want to negotiate, but gave her the right to transport six hundred Viennese Jewish children, assuming that she would not be able to bring these children to safety. A miscalculation for Eichmann, as Truus managed on 10/11 December 1938 to transport 600 of them per train to Hoek van Holland, from which 500 were shipped to England. The remaining 100 children were sheltered in Den Haag. Until the outbreak of the war she went on with the operation Kindertransport, each time with 150 children at a time. She took these groups a few times a week from Germany, until Nazi regime stopped the evacuation on 1 September 1939. During the German Occupation of the Netherlands she went on with her courageous resistance work. She continued, now on a different scale and via other routes and also focused on organizing food for the underground. She was arrested by the Gestapo in Amsterdam on the accusation of smuggling Jews to Switzerland. This was true, but the Gestapo could not prove anything and she returned to freedom. After the war she was politically active for the VVD liberal party in the community of Amsterdam. She died 30 August 1978 in Amsterdam. She had no children of her own, but kept a warm and concerned relationship with many of the by her saved children. She was honoured many times all over the world, but is still a rather unknown person in the Netherlands. Link to Wikipedia