When the Nazi officer smiled at her, she smiled back and asked:

“Want to go for a walk in the woods?”

He never came back.

A Childhood That Ended in Five Days

May 1940.

In the Netherlands, spring had just begun to soften the edges of winter. Tulips pushed through the soil. Bicycles rattled over cobblestones. Laundry flapped against blue skies.

And then the sky filled with planes.

The German invasion of the Netherlands took just five days.

Five days for the maps to change.
Five days for a country that had tried to stay neutral to be swallowed by the Nazi war machine.
Five days for childhood to end for thousands of Dutch kids who woke up in one world and went to sleep in another.

In the city of Haarlem, fourteen‑year‑old Freddie Oversteegen watched as German soldiers marched into her town.

Boots on bricks.
Helmets glinting.
Flags with crooked black crosses unfurling over buildings she’d known her whole life.

For many teenagers, the new reality meant a brutal kind of math:

Keep your head down.
Stay out of trouble.
Survive.

For Freddie and her sixteen‑year‑old sister Truus, that equation didn’t add up.

They had been raised in a different kind of household—one where injustice wasn’t something you merely regretted. It was something you opposed.

Their mother, a staunch communist and fierce anti‑fascist, had already been taking risks before the first German boot landed on Dutch soil. Their small home had been a refuge—a secret waystation—for Jewish refugees and resistance members long before “occupation” became a daily word.

Freddie and Truus had grown up watching strangers quietly enter their house, hearing hushed discussions behind closed doors, seeing extra plates appear on the table.

They didn’t have to be taught that something was wrong with Nazism. They had *seen* what people were running from.

So when the Nazis occupied their country, most people’s instinct was to hide.

The Oversteegen girls’ instinct was to fight.

—

### “We Need Young Women. The Nazis Don’t Suspect Girls.”

One day, a man came to their door.

His name was Frans van der Wiel. He was a local resistance leader. The networks fighting back were still in their early, fragile stages—small groups of people trying to figure out how to sabotage one of the most powerful armies in the world.

Frans didn’t waste time with flattery. He was blunt.

“We need young women,” he told their mother. “The Nazis don’t suspect girls.”

It was horrifying and practical all at once.

The occupiers moved through the world with a specific arrogance: they underestimated women.

Especially young ones.

Especially teenage girls with braids and ribbons in their hair and bicycles under their feet.

They looked harmless.

That made them dangerous.

Freddie and Truus were called into the conversation. This wasn’t some romantic invitation to an adventure. It was a proposition with consequences that could be fatal.

Do you want to join the resistance?

They didn’t ask how glamorous it would be. They didn’t ask whether they’d get medals.

They said yes.

Freddie was fourteen.

Truus was sixteen.

Their mother, despite the terrible risk, agreed.

Later, Freddie would be asked if she had hesitated.

She said no.

It seemed, in her family, that the real question was not, “Why would you fight?” but “How could you not?”

—

### From Posters to Pistols

At first, their work looked like the kind of resistance people are more comfortable celebrating.

They distributed underground newspapers—illegal pamphlets that carried real news rather than Nazi propaganda.

They crept out at night and pasted anti‑Nazi posters on walls and lampposts, their hearts pounding at every distant footstep.

They helped Jewish families go into hiding, escorting them from safe house to safe house, learning which doors to knock on and which to avoid.

In the beginning, the occupation still had an illusion of order. Curfews, new rules, different flags—but life, for some, went on.

Then things escalated.

Deportations began.

Jewish neighbors started disappearing—not just “going away,” but being rounded up, loaded into trucks, trains, never returning.

Rumors hardened into facts.

Whispers of “camps in the East” turned into a slowly dawning horror: extermination.

The resistance faced a brutal reality.

Leaflets wouldn’t be enough.

Posters wouldn’t be enough.

At some point, words wouldn’t stop trains.

They needed fighters.

They needed people willing to do something that feels like crossing a line you can never uncross.

They needed to kill.

Freddie was given a gun.

She was fifteen years old.

—

### A Schoolgirl With a Gun

It’s one thing to agree, in principle, that you’re part of the resistance.

It’s another thing entirely to hold cold metal in your hand and know it’s your responsibility to decide if and when it fires.

Freddie’s hands were still the hands of a child, in many ways. Hands that had braided hair, mended clothes, ridden handlebars on a bike.

Now they learned the weight of a pistol.

There is a myth we like to tell about heroes: that they relish the fight, that they are somehow different from us, born for violence.

Freddie shattered that myth with a single sentence, spoken decades later:

“I never felt it was fascinating, going out to ‘hunt’ with my gun. They were the enemy. We were at war.”

No thrill. No excitement. No bloodlust.

Just a grim, clear understanding: this is what war asked of her.

The strategy was cruelly clever.

Young girls like Freddie and Truus could move through occupied streets with a kind of invisibility men couldn’t.

Nazi officers and Dutch collaborators looked through them, not at them.

To the occupiers, they were decoration. Background. Harmless.

The resistance decided to use that blindness as a weapon.

Freddie would ride her bicycle through Haarlem, ribbons in her hair, wearing dresses that made her look soft, approachable, utterly unthreatening.

She knew what she was looking for.

Not just any German soldier.

Targets were carefully selected.

An SS officer.
A high‑ranking Nazi.
A Dutch collaborator whose betrayal had led to raids, arrests, deportations.

Men whose decisions had put families on trains to death camps.

When she saw one, the transformation began.

She’d slow her bicycle.

She’d smile.

She would speak flawless German—something that startled them, made them curious.

“Would you like to go for a walk?” she’d ask, in a voice built to sound shy, inviting. “I know a beautiful spot in the woods.”

The woods outside the city were where people went on dates. Walks. Romantic rendezvous.

These men believed they were being invited into something private and flattering.

They almost always said yes.

Because they had been taught to underestimate girls like Freddie.

Because they had been taught that danger looked like a man with a gun, not a fifteen‑year‑old with ribbons in her hair.

They followed.

Sometimes the woods held other resistance members, waiting, armed.

Sometimes Freddie herself pulled the trigger.

She did not brag about it later.

“It was not something I wanted to do,” she said as an elderly woman. “It was something that had to be done.”

—

### The Girl With the Red‑Haired Friend

They were not alone.

Another young woman joined them—a law student from Haarlem named Hannie Schaft.

Hannie had striking red hair and sharp eyes. She’d been in university when the Nazis demanded that students sign a pledge of loyalty to the regime in order to continue their studies.

Hannie refused.

She left school and went underground.

The three of them—Freddie, Truus, and Hannie—formed a small, tightly knit cell in the Haarlem resistance.

They were young. They were underestimated. They were lethal.

Hannie’s red hair was so distinctive it became dangerous. As her reputation among the Germans grew, her hair became a liability—a beacon.

She dyed it black to make herself harder to recognize.

Together, the three of them expanded their operations far beyond “honey trap” assassinations.

They sabotaged railway lines, trying to halt or derail trains that carried troops and Jewish prisoners.

They planted explosives on bridges to slow German movements, calculating the timing to maximize damage but minimize civilian casualties.

They did what so many resistance narratives gloss over—they entered the gray zones, where every action seemed to create both relief and risk.

Sabotage missions meant blowing things up in the dark, running back through shadows with their hearts pounding, never knowing if they’d been seen.

They smuggled Jewish children out of dangerous neighborhoods to hiding places, sometimes cycling with toddlers hidden in baskets under layers of vegetables.

Imagine pedaling through a checkpoint while a child under your turnips tries not to cough.

They did all of this while living in the same occupied reality as everyone else—ration cards, curfews, constant fear of informers.

And yes, they killed.

Not indiscriminately. Not impulsively.

Targets were debated.

Names were chosen.

The information came from resistance networks: “This man has betrayed families. This man’s information led to arrests.”

When everything else failed, when someone’s collaboration was directly costing lives, the three girls from Haarlem became executioners.

Freddie never called it heroism.

It was always, in her words, something no one should want to do.

But in a world where the legal system had been replaced by a killing machine, they created their own form of justice, as flawed and heavy as it was.

—

### The Cost of Every Mission

We like to tell resistance stories as if courage erases fear.

It doesn’t.

Freddie and her sister and Hannie lived in a constant state of tension.

Every time they left the house, they knew it might be their last walk down that street.

Every time they passed a German patrol, their minds raced: “Do they know? Has someone talked? Is today the day they stop me?”

Every knock at the door could be a neighbor in need—or an informer with soldiers.

The Nazis didn’t just execute resistance members. They did it publicly.

They hung bodies in town squares.

They shot people by the side of the road and left the corpses visible.

It wasn’t just effective brutality. It was theater.

Every public execution was a message:

This is what happens if you resist.

Freddie saw those bodies.

Then she got back on her bicycle and rode out again.

Sometimes she carried messages.
Sometimes she carried a gun.
Sometimes she carried a child hidden in her basket.

The courage isn’t in the theatrical moments—pulling the trigger, blowing up tracks. It’s in the hundred small decisions to keep going.

To walk toward a target instead of turning away.

To smile when inside you want to run.

To flirt with a man whose uniform represents everything you despise, in order to lead him into shadows where he will die.

Those are not choices that “feel good.”

They are choices that carve themselves into you.

Freddie understood, even then, that she was trading pieces of her own peace for the chance that someone else might live.

—

### The Capture of Hannie Schaft

By 1945, the war was grinding toward its end—but occupation often becomes *more* dangerous as oppressors feel power slipping away.

The Nazis in the Netherlands grew more desperate, more paranoid, more brutal.

In March 1945, just weeks before liberation, they captured Hannie.

The red‑haired law student who’d dyed her hair black had become one of the most wanted resistance members in the country. They called her “the girl with the red hair.”

When they finally arrested her, they knew who they had.

They tortured her brutally, trying to force information out of her—names, locations, plans.

She gave them nothing.

On April 17, 1945—three weeks before the Netherlands was liberated—Hannie Schaft was taken to the dunes near Haarlem.

They shot her there.

She was twenty‑four years old.

For Freddie and Truus, Hannie’s death was a cleaving.

It was a reminder that survival was never guaranteed, no matter how careful you were.

It was also a chilling preview of what would have happened to them if they’d been caught.

After the war, Hannie became a symbol of Dutch resistance.

Statues were built. Streets were named after her. Schoolchildren learned her name.

Freddie and Truus did not become symbols.

They became something else:

Women who went home and got very quiet.

—

### The Silence After the War

When the war ended, and Allied troops rolled through cheering Dutch streets, the narrative began to be written.

There were heroes.

There were traitors.

There were victims.

Everyone wanted a clean story.

Freddie and Truus did not fit easily into any category.

They were heroes—but not the kind the country knew what to do with.

Society was more comfortable with resistance fighters who had distributed leaflets, hidden refuges, refused to sign loyalty oaths.

Those were “clean” acts.

Killing—especially killing in a way that used femininity as bait—was something else.

Teenage girls who flirted with Nazis to lead them to their deaths did not fit the image of the innocent, suffering nation.

So the Oversteegen sisters did what many people do with unbearable memories:

They folded them inward.

They married.

They had children.

They worked ordinary jobs. Freddie became an artist, creating clay sculptures and other work with her hands, shaping visible forms from the invisible weight she carried.

For decades, they rarely spoke about what they had done.

Their children grew up with mothers who were loving but carried something unspoken in their past.

When Freddie was finally asked, late in life, why she had kept quiet so long, she was blunt:

“People think of it as an adventure,” she said. “But there was nothing adventurous about it. I still get nightmares about the things I had to do.”

Adventure is what you call something when you don’t have to live with the consequences.

This was not an adventure for her.

It was survival.
It was duty.
It was trauma.

The world moved on.

She tried to.

Her nightmares did not.

—

### Breaking the Silence

Decades passed.

The war that had defined her youth became history in textbooks, condensed into dates and maps and bullet points.

Meanwhile, something else began to happen—a quieter threat.

Holocaust denial.

Minimization.

People claiming it “wasn’t that bad,” or that numbers were exaggerated, or that resistance wasn’t necessary.

Freddie watched younger generations grow up presuming freedom, not understanding what occupation meant—the curfews, the hunger, the constant fear of who might inform on you.

She realized that her silence was becoming dangerous.

Her story wasn’t just hers anymore. It was evidence.

She began to talk.

Slowly. Carefully. With the kind of reluctance that tells you the words scrape coming out.

She spoke in interviews.

She spoke to students.

She told them what it meant to be fifteen and carrying a gun. To ride a bicycle smiling at men you intended to lead to death.

She told the hard parts.

Not just the heroic sabotage, but the sleepless nights and the moral knots.

She insisted people understand that resistance was not a glossy montage of brave acts.

It was terrifying.

It was morally complex.

It left scars that no medal could smooth over.

“When evil is systematically murdering your neighbors,” she said in essence, “silence is complicity.”

She wanted young people to know that you cannot always stay clean in a dirty world.

Sometimes, doing the right thing means doing something that will haunt you.

That’s a truth most war stories skip.

Freddie refused to.

—

### Recognition—Sixty‑Nine Years Late

In 2014, Freddie was 89 years old.

Almost seventy years had passed since the end of the war.

The Netherlands had long since honored other resistance figures—men, commanders, leaders.

Finally, the state turned its attention to two elderly sisters who had spent their teenage years on bicycles with guns in their coat pockets.

Freddie and Truus were awarded the Mobilization War Cross by the Dutch government, one of the country’s highest military honors.

The moment was formal. The medals were real. The recognition was, in every sense, late.

Freddie stood there, small, white‑haired, the lines on her face evidence of years far beyond the war.

She accepted the honor.

Then she did what she had always done.

She cut through the ceremony with modesty.

“We didn’t do this for recognition,” she said simply. “We did it because it was right.”

That sentence holds the core of who she was.

If no one had ever known what she did, it would not have changed the necessity of it.

Heroism, in her world, wasn’t a title.

It was a series of choices you made when nobody was watching.

—

### The Girl With Ribbons in Her Hair

Freddie Oversteegen died in 2018 at age 92.

Her sister Truus had died two years earlier, at 93.

By the time Freddie’s story reached wider audiences, she was already an old woman.

People saw photographs of her then—soft sweaters, gentle eyes, the kind of face you’d trust to tell you a story or knit you a scarf.

Then they read what she had done.

“She killed Nazis?”

“She seduced officers into the woods?”

“She carried a gun at fifteen?”

They were shocked.

As if kindness and lethal courage could not exist in the same body.

As if the only people capable of violence in service of justice were men.

Freddie’s existence demolished that assumption.

Yes, this sweet elderly woman had been a teenage assassin.

Yes, she had used her youth and appearance as weapons.

Yes, she had pulled triggers that ended lives.

Not because she enjoyed it.

Not because she wanted power.

Because that’s what resistance looked like, in the real world, under real occupation.

Sometimes resistance is hiding a family in your attic.

Sometimes it is printing a leaflet.

Sometimes it is refusing to sign a form.

And sometimes it is a fourteen‑year‑old girl on a bicycle, saying, “Let’s go for a walk,” knowing full well she is leading a man to his execution.

None of those things are clean.

All of them are necessary.

—

### The Weight of Impossible Choices

Freddie never called herself a hero.

She called herself a survivor who made impossible choices in an impossible time.

She understood something that people sitting safely decades later sometimes forget:

Evil does not care how old you are.

Fascism doesn’t pause when it sees a child.

The Nazis did not say, “They’re only girls, let’s spare them.”

They deported children.
They shot teenagers.
They starved infants.

So when young people—teenage girls with ribbons in their hair—decided to fight back, they were not stepping into an adult game.

They were stepping into a war that had already marked them as expendable.

Freddie was fourteen when she joined the resistance.

She was fifteen when she killed for the first time.

She was nineteen when the war ended.

And she was ninety‑two when she died, having spent more than seventy years carrying the memory of what she’d done—not with swagger, but with a quiet, persistent understanding:

When her country needed someone to stand between organized evil and defenseless lives, she stepped forward.

Even when stepping forward meant stepping into darkness.

Even when it meant doing things that would give her nightmares for the rest of her life.

Even when she was still young enough that, in another world, her biggest problem should have been school exams or crushes, not whether she could pull a trigger when the moment came.

She was fourteen years old with ribbons in her hair.

And she saved lives by taking others.

That’s not a comforting story.

But it’s a true one.

And because Freddie Oversteegen chose, finally, to tell it, we don’t get to look away.