Joanna Roman

Fernanda Kapteijn was a teenager from Utrecht and a bicycle courier for the resistance. Women like Kapteijn were essential to the resistance as they were less likely to attract suspicion and were not subject to forced labour for the Nazi regime.

Fernanda Kapteijn was the daughter of communist parents who ran a bookshop in Utrecht. The family lived above the shop. Right from the beginning of the war, Fernanda, like her parents, became active in the resistance. In the bookshop, illegal newspapers were stenciled. Fernanda distributed these newspapers and money to families whose fathers had been arrested. “You couldn’t be afraid. You just had to be safe. Your bike had to be okay, your light had to be okay. Because you should never be caught for anything else.”

One day, Fernanda was en route with 500 illegal brochures in her saddlebags when things almost went wrong. “Suddenly, there was a German checkpoint.” One of the German soldiers nudged her saddlebag with the butt of his rifle. There were potatoes on top of the brochures and the German soldier allowed Fernanda to pass.

 “I started walking as slowly and casually as I could, though I felt like running at full tilt!”

By the end of 1944, bicycle couriers became even more essential to the resistance. In mid-September 1944, the Dutch government in exile in London had called for a railway strike to bring the transport of German troops to a halt. Some 30,000 railway workers went into hiding, with financial support from London. Because of the railway strike, it became more difficult for the resistance to communicate over longer distances. There were hardly any cars and there was no petrol. As a result, the resistance communicated mainly via bicycle courier services and illegal telephone connections. To facilitate this a bicycle courier network with regular connections was established.

When Fernanda was ordered to carry a gun by the communist resistance group of her parents, she refused. “Then I thought to myself: not now and not ever. I don’t have the right to take someone’s life.”

19-year-old Indonesian Evy Poetiray came to the Netherlands in 1937 to study. Three years later, the Netherlands was occupied by Nazi Germany. Evy resisted the Nazi regime. As a young woman, she helped people in hiding and distributed resistance newspapers.

Indonesia, then called the Dutch East Indies, was a colony of the Netherlands. There were 800 to 1,000 Indonesians living in the Netherlands in 1940. Like many Indonesian students in the Netherlands, Evy Poetiray was a member of the student association Perhimpoenan Indonesia (PI). The PI members were in favour of Indonesian independence and opposed to Dutch colonial rule. But they were also against the racist Nazi regime. After the German invasion the PI members had to decide if they would now fight on the side of their colonial oppressor. The board called upon members to resist the German occupation.

The PI was forbidden by the German occupiers, but the members continued working together in the resistance. Evy: “It was well organised. Out of five people, only one person was in contact with the leadership of Perhimpunan Indonesia. We met every week.”Evy hid people in her house and began distributing resistance newspapers. “Distributing those magazines was very dangerous, but I was young and I dared to do so.” Evy worked closely with Dutch members of the resistance. “The Indonesians constantly appealed to the conscience of the Dutch. Because they themselves were now being oppressed, they came to understand the Indonesian struggle. And they published articles about the independence of Indonesia.”

People of colour were seen as inferior by the Nazis, but they were not actively persecuted. As a young woman of colour, Evy was not easily suspected. She never got into trouble because of her resistance work.

After the liberation of the Netherlands, Evy dedicated herself to Indonesian independence. She was very disappointed when the Netherlands did not recognise Indonesia’s independence after the Second World War and started a war to regain control over its colony. After four years of war, and under international pressure, the Netherlands recognised Indonesia’s independence in 1949.

When Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940, Ernst Sillem was 16 years old. From the start, he tried to thwart the occupier.

School boy Ernst Sillem felt that most Dutch people were not doing enough to resist the German occupiers. In 1940, normal life seemed to go on as usual. For Ernst, that was incomprehensible. “Something must be done!” he thought. One evening in late January 1941, he quietly climbed out of his bedroom window with a flashlight, paint and a brush. He walked to his school in Baarn, where he broke a window and crawled inside. In the gleam of the flashlight, he painted messages on the walls: “Out, Krauts” and “Don’t be passively anti-German, take action!!!!”

The police launched an investigation. The highest classes of his school had to take a writing and spelling test to find out who was responsible, but the perpetrator was never found. The story of the act spread throughout the Netherlands. “I was extremely happy that that message circulated throughout the Netherlands, because that was the intention! I wanted there to be movement in the anti-German mentality.”

Ernst did not stop at this kind of action. Together with his friend Jaap van Mesdag, he wanted to go to England to fight against Nazi Germany. Using a canoe, they tried to cross the North Sea in the night of 31 August to 1 September 1942. Ernst and Jaap were caught up in bad weather and were rescued by a German ship in the nick of time. They were captured and instead of England, they ended up in several prisons and concentration camps. After 2.5 tough years, on 29 April 1945 they were finally liberated from the Dachau concentration camp.

Ernst was not the only person who tried to reach England during the war. About 2,000 Dutch people reached Engeland, including at least 48 women. Over 200 people did not survive these attempts. Most of those who reached England, joined the Dutch or British secret service, the British army or the Prinses Irene Brigade, the army formed by the Dutch government in exile.

Boy Ecury from Aruba – a Caribbean island colonized by the Dutch – was studying in the Netherlands when the country was occupied. He helped to sabotage German trucks and trains and got deeply involved in the armed resistance.

As soon as the Netherlands was occupied by nazi Germany, Boy turned against the totalitarian, discriminatory regime of the occupiers. Together with his friend and fellow student from Curaçao – also a Dutch Caribbean island – Luis de Lannoy, he immediately became active in the resistance.

Using homemade firebombs, he set fire to German trucks and soon became involved in other forms of resistance, such as helping Allied pilots who had been shot down. Boy brought the pilots, dressed as farm boys to a contact on the Belgian border by bicycle. Because Boy was black, he stood out. The downside of this was that he was often stopped, but luckily his papers were always in order. The advantage was that the disguised pilots were less conspicuous.

During the war, a few thousand black people from Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean Islands were living in the German-occupied Netherlands. They were seen as inferior by the Nazis, but they were not actively persecuted.

In February 1944, Luis de Lannoy was arrested. Boy tried to free him from prison but failed. A few months later, Boy and some others carried out a successful attack on a railway line. “It was pitch black […]” a resistance friend of Boy’s explains. They undid the bolts holding the railway in place, which was a difficult job. “The tension became almost unbearable. Then it happened. The huge locomotive ran out of the rails under a shower of sparks!”

After the successful sabotage attack, the police raided Boy’s lodging, and he had to flee. He wanted to join a group of resistance fighters in Amsterdam, but they thought his black skin stood out too much. Disappointed, Boy roamed about, until he was taken in by a group in The Hague. He felt anxious and persecuted but remained active. “I have no wife and no children. If I don’t help out, who will?”

In early November 1944, Boy was recognised on the street and arrested. During the long, violent interrogations, he admitted nothing and remained belligerent, saying: “I will continue to fight you.”

Boy was executed on 6 November 1944. After the war his body was reburied in Aruba. His friend Luis de Lannoy survived the war.