Wijsmuller Gertruida (Meijer)

Wijsmuller, Geertruida (Meijer) Resistance worker Geertruida Wijsmuller fought courageously to save thousands of Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis. Geertruida, or Truus, as her friends called her, was born in Alkmaar into a prosperous well-connected family and lived from 1913 in Amsterdam. In December 1938, Truus went to meet Adolph Eichmann in Vienna to request permission for 600 Jewish children to leave Austria for England. She was given permission to take 600 Jewish children to England under the provision that they leave within five days. Despite the bureaucratic problems the children fled the country that same week. Truus’s big advantage was that she was a non-Jew with access to the Nazi power structure. Supported by the members of the children’s committees and her connections in high places, Truus operated in Germany and Austria from 1938, collecting Jewish children whose families wished them to go into hiding: from Vienna, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Berlin, and Breslau, as well as from Prague, Danzig, and Konigsberg. Every week, 500 children, divided into groups of about 150, would leave the Dutch port of Hoek van Holland, bound for England. The last transport left Holland via IJmuiden on May 14, 1940, the day Holland surrendered to the Wehrmacht. On board, Truus Wijsmuller had placed five busloads of children from the Burgerweeshuis, the municipal orphanage of Amsterdam, and from other homes in the city that had sheltered children from central Europe. In her efforts to save Jews, Truus had been involved in transporting Jews originally from the Baltic area and Poland who had found their way to western Europe. She would arrange for them to travel to Marseilles, where they could book a passage to Palestine. In addition to accompanying refugees, she was also involved in the transportation of medication and food to the French camps of Gurs and St. Cyprien in the unoccupied zone of France. In 1941, the Germans decreed that Jews could leave the Netherlands for a payment of 50,000 Swiss francs. This produced a new wave of refugees to southern France and Spain. Truus offered to accompany these groups, never more than 35 at a time, by train from Amsterdam to Brussels and on to Paris and the south of France. From there, the refugees could pass into Spain and then to countries farther afield. Truus’s activities never went entirely unnoticed by the authorities. For reasons never explained, the Dutch Red Cross accused her in February 1941 of carrying forged identity papers. Although the matter was cleared up, Truus was subsequently barred from entering Vichy France. Later, on May 20, 1941, the Gestapo arrested her on the same charges and subjected her to interrogation. She was released due to lack of evidence and requested by her Resistance group to ease up on her activities lest she endanger others. From then on, Truus’s main job was to provide food parcels for the people interned in Westerbork, Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt, and the prisons in Amsterdam. She worked in cooperation with a group based in a church and was able to provide the group with extra food coupons via her Resistance unit. One day in 1944, word was sent to the church group that food parcels for 50 orphans in Westerbork were no longer needed, since the children were to be transported to Auschwitz. Shocked by the message, Truus went to the authorities and managed to persuade the Germans that the orphans were “Aryan” and the children received special treatment. In September 1944 they were sent first to Bergen-Belsen and then to Theresienstadt, where they were fed and clothed better than the other inmates. After the war, when the first train from Theresienstadt arrived in Maastricht in May 1945, Truus was there to meet the children. All 50 had survived. In recognition of her heroism, many countries honored Geertruida Wijsmuller. On September 30, 1948, she received a Medal of Gratitude from the French Republic; in May 1957, she was honored in Bonn by the German Red Cross; in 1959 she received the Star of Merit of the Order of St. George of Antioch. On October 18, 1966, Yad Vashem recognized Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer as Righteous Among the Nations.