After the Kristallnacht, the outburst of violence against Jews and Jewish possessions in Nazi Germany on the night of 9 to 10 November 1938, tens of thousands of Jewish Germans fled.
Wijsmuller-Meijer went to Vienna and arranged to meet SS commander Adolf Eichmann, who was primarily responsible for solving the so-called ‘Jewish problem’. She got him to take 600 children from Austria, which was incorporated by Germany, writes Lody van der Kamp, author of a book about child transport, on the site of the Municipality of Amsterdam.
Within two days Wijsmuller-Meijer managed to organize residence permits and accommodation for the 600 children and brought them to Great Britain via Nazi Germany and the Netherlands.
10,000 children
Afterwards Wijsmuller also picked up children in Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland. The train after train brought children to Hoek van Holland, where they boarded the boat to England. When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and the borders closed, it came to an end. She had saved 10,000 children at the time. In England they were admitted to host families or shelters.
On the last day before the Dutch capitulation, on 14 May 1940, she managed to get 74 Jewish children from Amsterdam to England via IJmuiden.
“Was never really in danger”
The resistance heroine herself had no children. After the war, she became a municipal councilor for the VVD in Amsterdam.
The book appeared in the early 1960s No time for tears, in which she told her story. “My part in saving people wasn’t that important,” Wijsmuller quotes. “I didn’t do my job in the war. It was before the war. I was never really in danger.” And further: “What I did was not enough. It was only about ten thousand children. How many millions did not die afterwards?”
Truus Wijsmuller died in 1978. Next month in Alkmaar a bronze statue revealed van Wijsmuller, surrounded by 28 children.
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