Dutch Resistance worker who sheltered more than 100 Jews during the German occupation of Amsterdam
One of the myths about the Netherlands during the Second World War is that the Dutch demonstrated a universal sympathy for the country’s Jewish community and went to extraordinary lengths to save them from the gas chambers. In fact, proportionately more Dutch Jews were deported to Auschwitz and other death camps than Belgian or Danish Jews. The Dutch police routinely rounded up Jewish citizens; little legal impediment was put in the way by either the judiciary or the civil service. Informers, as well as out-and-out collaborators, were everywhere.
After the Liberation in 1945, the mood of many Dutch people was one of resentment towards those 30,000 or so Jews who had survived the Holocaust. An editorial in the leading Resistance paper De Patriot, quoted recently by the Dutch journalist Simon Kuper, summed up the public mood: “The Jews emerging from hiding should thank God for the help they were given and should feel small. Perhaps many better people were lost.”
It can hardly be regarded as odd in the circumstances that some three quarters of those Jews who survived left the Netherlands in the immediate postwar years, with most emigrating to the United States or Israel. Yet amid the general descent into darkness that began with the Nazi occupation, there were among the Dutch people those who did take the selfless decision to resist. The story of Anne Frank, and how she and her family were kept hidden for two years until, ultimately, they were betrayed, is well known. But thousands of other Dutch Jews were similarly given refuge by their Christian fellow countrymen and women, whose stories have only intermittently been told.
Of the Dutch prepared to put their lives at risk, one of the bravest and most resolute was Tina Strobos, née Buchter. She was just 20 years old, a medical student, when the Wehrmacht, closely followed by the Gestapo, marched into Amsterdam in May 1940.
Tineke Buchter was born in Amsterdam in 1920, the daughter of Alphonse Buchter, a socialist and atheist, and his wife Marie, née Schotte. Her parents’ marriage ended in divorce before the invasion. Tina grew up with her mother in an elegant but cramped townhouse, No 282 Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, near the Royal Palace in Dam Square and what is now Amsterdam’s red-light district. Not far away, across a series of small bridges, was the house on the Prinsengracht in which the Frank family were hidden.
With the city now under the firm control of the Germans, students were required to sign an oath of loyalty to the new regime. Thousands, including Tina, refused and were barred from continuing their studies. Some of these refuseniks joined the still nascent Resistance. It was unclear in the early days what role civilian combatants could play, and for a time Tina ran errands, carrying small arms and ammunition concealed in the wicker basket of her bicycle. It was dangerous work. Those who were caught were interrogated, tortured and shot. But she refused to give up.
Soon, however, it became clear that a central part of the occupation was to be the “cleansing” of the Netherlands’ Jewish community, some 140,000 strong and including numerous recent refugees from Germany and Austria.
Her mother was one of the first to realise that a terrible crime was under way. It was she who persuaded her daughter that the best way they could resist Nazi ideology was by saving as many Jews as possible from deportation and, it was feared, certain death. The death camps in Eastern Europe were not yet in production, but the casual murder of Jews — forced to wear the yellow star of David — was already commonplace and there could be no doubt that those dragged from their homes faced the grimmest of futures.
Over the course of the next four years, the two women hid more than 100 Jews — men, women and children — in the disguised gable of their attic, passing them along to the Resistance who then spirited them to safety in the countryside or, if possible, to Britain.
Strobos was both daring and inventive, working with local pickpockets to acquire identity papers and on one occasion stealing documents from coats and jackets hung on a rack during a funeral service. She tried not to lose touch with those she had helped, often bringing books, newspapers, clothes and food coupons to Jews removed to locations in rural Holland.
It is one of the stranger aspects of her heroic career at this time that the Gestapo never conclusively “proved” that she was acting against their draconian race laws. Strobos, a fluent German speaker, was arrested and questioned nine times. Once she was thrown against a wall and knocked unconcious. But she never cracked, and the Gestapo and wider Sicherheitsdienst (SD) eventually gave up. The house in the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal was raided on a number of occasions, but it, too, never gave up its secret.
Among the Jews she helped to save was Abraham Pais, later a celebrated particle physicist and the biographer of Einstein. The two became engaged but never married. Pais, whose sister died at Sobibor after she was betrayed by an informant and who himself was spared deportation and execution only by the arrival of the Allies, said susbsequently that the ties between them would never break.
After the war, with Amsterdam mired in poverty, Strobos resumed her studies and qualified as a doctor, specialising, perhaps unsurprisingly, in mental disorders. She took her doctorate while based for a time in London, tutored by Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund. In 1951 she emigrated to the US, where she settled in Westchester County, New York, and eventually opened her own psychiatric practice.
Along the way, she had met and married Robert Strobos, a neurologist, with whom she had two sons and a daughter. She and Strobos divorced in 1964. Later, she married Walter Chudson, an economist, who died in 2002. In addition to her own children, there were two stepchildren, seven grandchildren and two step-grandchildren.
Full recognition of her achievement, and that of her late mother, did not come immediately. It was not until 1989 that the two were declared by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial institution, to be “righteous among the nations” — an honour Strobos shares with the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and the German industrialist Oskar Schindler.
Strobos lectured frequently on Holocaust topics and on the role played by the Dutch Resistance, and throughout her long life spoke out on behalf of immigrants and the disadvantaged. What she had done was the right thing to do, she told The New York Times. “Your conscience tells you to do it. I believe in heroism, and when you’re young you want to do dangerous things.”
Tina Strobos, née Buchter, Dutch resistance worker and physician, was born on May 19, 1920. She died on February 27, 2012, aged 91