This evening I got a nice e-mail from a publicist for a book publisher. She wrote:
Dear Howie,Last year an obituary in the Washington Post exploded, drawing almost 700 comments and a firestorm on social media: Freddie Oversteegen, Dutch Resistance fighter who killed Nazis through seduction, dies at 92. There’s an incredibly controversial story here of three teenage Dutch Resistance fighters who did what they did "because it had to be done." They learned to shoot, to seduce and liquidate targeted Nazis and their collaborators, to attack and bomb railways and other strategic places, to gather information, to help Jews and children find safe places to hide, and to steal identification papers for them. Remarkably, Dutch lecturer and author, Sophie Poldermans personally knew sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen for over 20 years and worked with them for over a decade as a board member of the National Hannie Schaft Foundation. Poldermans tells their harrowing story and that of Hannie Schaft’s in her new book, Seducing and Killing Nazis-- Hannie, Truus, and Freddie: Dutch Resistance Heroines of WWII [SWW Press, August 2019].In Seducing and Killing Nazis, Poldermans answers and provides:• Her personal relationships with Freddie and Truus over the last 20 years, and how they survived the burden of their past• Knowing the Oversteegen sisters personally and the story of Hannie, what drove these young women/girls to the armed resistance? What is it that made them take up arms in order to fight the enemy?• What specific action of resistance made the three young women, Hannie Schaft and the sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, famous?• A full historical account and objective research, including witness interviews, around the lives and resistance work of these three women• The political aftermath and fight for recognition after the war in detail, and why this story is important today• Archived photos and precise maps that accompany the history, including liquidation spotsInterested in a review copy or interview/Feature with Sophie Poldermans?
I was interested-- very interested-- and decided to respond by sending this old post and asking the publicist to read the final paragraph.I lived in Amsterdam for nearly 4 years back in the 1970s. One of my closest friends, Eveline Pommier, had a French father and Dutch mother, Hilda Pommier Van Norden, a decorated heroine of the Dutch Resistance. Among our friendship circle in Amsterdam, I was the only one with a car at the time and we used to visit her mother in Paris frequently. Besides being a resistance hero, her mother was a talented painter and very easy to bond with. We developed a friendship over the years. Her daughter, my friend Eveline, was still in her early twenties when she took a trip to India. She died there. It was emotionally devastating for Hilda, for me and for my closest friend in Amsterdam, Toon, her old boyfriend, and for all of our friends.As the years and decades passed by I always made a point of visiting Paris as often as I could and always visited Hilda when I was in Paris. I always wanted to tape her stories about fighting the Nazis as a young woman in her twenties, the age of Eveline when I knew her. But, regrettably, I never got it together.A couple of years ago I was in Paris for a little holiday but Hilda wasn't there. She was 95 and fragile of mind and body and was back in Amsterdam being looked after by her family. Toon kept me up on her condition and I was thinking of making a quick side trip to Amsterdam to say hello. He said she wouldn't recognize me. I didn't go and while we were in Paris she passed away, peacefully in her bed. She blew up a Nazi troop train when she was 23 years old. I don't know anyone else who ever did that. THAT'S Resistance-- a 23 year old Dutch girl and her 2 brothers going out into the country with a plan... and pulling it off. I hope it never comes to that here. Oh, I really, really do. Please, God, don't let it come to that here. What would I do? What would you do? The Dutch government gave her a medal and a pension for what she did.This is a self-portrait of Eveline. I have a print of it in my house and I see it everyday...
