‘Her war never stopped’: the Dutch teenager who resisted the Nazis
Freddie Oversteegen, who has died at 93, waged a campaign of killing and sabotage – but struggled to adapt to peacetime
by Naomi O'Leary in Haarlem
Sep 23, 2018
4 minutes
The first thing the Nazis took from Freddie Oversteegen was her bed.
Her mother, Trijn, a communist bringing up her children independently in the Dutch city of Haarlem, sheltered Jews, dissidents and gay people as they fled Germany in the 1930s. Oversteegen, who was seven when Adolf Hitler came to power, bunked in with her big sister Truus to make room.
It was the start of a struggle that would last until she died on 5 September, the day before her 93rd birthday, in a nursing home not far from where, as teenagers, she and Truus carried out a campaign of
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