Mrs. Truus Wijsmuller (pronounced as /Truys Waismulla/) aka “Tante Truus” or Auntie Truus saved over 10,000 Jewish children. She convinced Adolf Eichmann to allow her to take Jewish children out of Nazi-Vienna, starting her famous Kindertransports. However, during her lifetime, the only recognition for her war work came in 1966 when she was invited to Jerusalem to be honored as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem.

I am ashamed that Holland did not recognize her as the War hero she was. A 2011 statue of a group of children at Hook-of-Holland in remembrance of the Kindertransports claims on a plaque that the Jewish children were “aided by the Dutch government and Dutch volunteers.” A handful of streets in Dutch cities as well as a bridge in Amsterdam were named after Truus Wijsmuller, but until about 2010 when various women started writing about her, most (Dutch) people had no idea who she was.

After the war, Mrs. Wijsmuller worked for the predecessor of the UN, tracking down displaced children in Germany, England, Switzerland, and Denmark. Later, she became involved with local politics. She would continue to live with her husband, Joop, and trusted assistant and housekeeper Cietje Hackmann in their apartment on the Nassaukade 125 in Amsterdam for nearly 50 years. Her residence was only a few blocks from the Anne Frank Organization, which she helped found in 1957.

The only thanks Mrs. Wijsmuller ever got was for helping found a children’s hospital; a small bust of her on a granite pedestal was revealed in 1965, yet later, due to repurposing of that area, the statue was unceremoniously removed to be kept in cupboard in Mrs. Wijsmuller’s own house until she passed away in 1978 when it was put on the Bach Square in Amsterdam where it remains.

Mrs. Wijsmuller’s true reward during her lifetime was seeing the children she had rescued grow up to lead productive lives. While Mrs. Wijsmuller had erased Eichman from her mind (she literally did not recognize pictures of him at his Jerusalem Trial in 1962), she remembered most of the many children she had rescued till her dying day.