Alewijk van Trijntje (Roffel)

Alewijk van, Trijntje (Roffel) Wiesje Samuel Prins (later de Lange) was born in July 1938 to Jewish parents who tried to find a safe hiding place for their daughter in 1943, after most of Holland’s Jews had already been deported to the east. Eventually their efforts paid off and Wiesje went into hiding in Nijmegen, Gelderland and her parents found themselves a hiding place too. Although Wiesje was quite safe she had to leave suddenly. Through the intervention of the Reverend Hijmans*, who was active in the local Resistance, a young Resistance worker came and took Wiesje on her bicycle to a friend named Trijntje (Trinie) Roffel, who lived in Hengelo, Overijssel. Trinie was the youngest of ten children, all of whom were connected in some way to the Resistance. Although only 17, she had already been very active in the underground and when she met the little girl in need of a hiding place she begged her parents to keep Wiesje in their home. Trinie felt that God had sent her the little sister she had always wanted. Her parents agreed on condition that Trinie looked after Wiesje. Being devout Calvinists, the Roffels believed that the Jews were God’s Chosen People, but being elderly they also knew that they did not have the strength to take daily care of a young child. Wiesje stayed with Trinie until the end of the war, a period of about two years, and then her parents, who had been looking everywhere for her, found her and took her back with them. Trinie knew the Germans were after her and tried to hide from them. She had made a hiding place for herself and Wiesje in the closet under the staircase of her parents’ home. When the Germans were about to open the closet Trinie quickly jumped out and said: “I am the one you are looking for.” She was arrested, but the Germans, who were not aware of anyone else’s presence, did not check inside the closet. Thus Wiesje’s life was saved, but she was now without a caretaker. It was after this incident that the large Roffel*family came to her rescue. She spent time with all of them, going from one to the other “on vacation” until Trinie was released from prison and came back to her parents’ home. Shortly before the end of the war, when Hengelo was heavily bombed and the Roffels’ home was hit, the whole family moved away to stay with Harmke ter Welle-Roffel, one of the daughters, who had a son, Herman, who was only a few years older than Wiesje. They stayed there until the liberation in May 1945. After the war, Wiesje and Trinie lost touch and only met again in 1992. Wiesje wrote a book about her rescuer Trinie van Alewijk-Roffel called Een Tocht voor Trinie (“A Trek for Trinie”). On March 20th, 1994, Yad Vashem recognized Trijntje van Alewijk-Roffel as Righteous Among the Nations.