Ode to Henrika van den Noord | I did what I had to do

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Hello Hendrika, or may I say Riekie,

It is now 2024. Sixteen years after you sneaked out. 83 you were. You couldn't do it anymore. You were spent. Mentally especially. Funny really, because through your life, no one ever noticed anything wrong with you. Until in recent years you suddenly didn't want to turn on the television in April. Let alone in May.

Things started to go really wrong when your daughter took you - at your insistence - to the grave of resistance fighter Leo Frijda at the age of eighty. There you collapsed, and subsequently you never recovered. Your war trauma seemed to catch up with you. There, at the Bloemendaal Cemetery of Honor, at the grave of your hero. You never wanted to hear that you were a hero yourself. If you talked about the war at all, you said, 'I did what I had to do.' Applying for a resistance cross, ´No way´. There were always people who had done much more than you, you thought.

According to your daughter, my dear neighbor Ellen Blankers, you felled into Amsterdam's armed resistance group CS6 as a seventeen-year-old, drop-dead gorgeous girl. There were more women in the resistance, many more even than we can now find in the history books, but women in the armed resistance were quite exceptional. How you nevertheless, and at such a young age, became involved in this group, your daughter does not know. Everything she knows, your grandson had to drag out of you.

Together with your father and mother, you were living at 97 III Mercator Street when the war broke out. The two Jewish hiders your parents hid in the attic there were discovered. You will never forget the boots that came thundering up all those three flights of stairs. As well as the shots fired at the two hiders. Their attempt to escape through the balcony failed. On the spot, they were shot dead. You saw this happen. Why you and your mother were never taken away, no one knows. Were they perhaps easier at the beginning of the war? Was it your beautiful appearance? Who will know. Your daughter still regrets not asking you more.

On that same Mercator Street, those awful boots came storming up a second time. It turned out to be a raid. Right when you had a considerable number of resistance weapons under your mattress. In panic, you lay down on the bed, with a few coats over each other. When the door to your room was pulled open, the Germans asked what was going on. 'A very contagious disease,' your mother said. That you were sweating sinews was perfectly convenient. The Germans, afraid of any kind of disease, did not know how quickly to get away.

The story that you with someone tried to set the Hollandsche Schouwburg on fire was identified by the Resistance Museum Amsterdam. The resistance group gave you a tube of toothpaste containing a substance that would burn quickly. The fire did indeed start, but - to your great disappointment - it was extinguished in time. For years the Resistance Museum searched for the name of the person who had dared to carry out this action together with Hans Katan. They have since included your personal ID in the archives.

In the resistance group, you obviously did not operate under your own name. That was far too dangerous. Your name was Corry. We don't know your last name. As Corry, you once brought weapons to the Hembrug in Amsterdam, where you transferred them to Hannie Schaft - the famous resistance woman who was arrested and executed in 1945. You too would not have reached the age of 83, Riekie. If Leo had talked back then, you would no longer be here. You said so yourself at his grave.

Leo Frijda. One of the leaders of CS6. Your daughter sometimes suspects that there was more between you, but even that remains a guess. The fact remains that you hardly ever spoke about the war, but at the end of your life you had to go to Leo's grave at all costs. Not to any of the other nineteen executed CS6 members, like Hans Katan - no, to Leo. The story that you and a young man had to play a couple in love in front of an NSB member's house points in the direction of Leo Frijda, but no one knows for sure either. Were you indeed lying there in the grass with him? The NSB'er was shot a short time later by CS6. He survived.

You are no longer here Riekie, not for sixteen years, but it is important that your story be told. A story in which many pieces of the puzzle are missing, a story that you have largely taken to your grave, a story that raises questions, and a story that - fair is fair - is difficult to verify.

But even if the story were (partially) wrong, I think it should be shared. It is, after all, a story full of hope. And hope we can well use at a time when we sometimes permanently lose faith in people.

Personally, I fully assume that your story is true Riekie, and I want to thank you for fighting for our freedom. I can only hope that, if it ever comes down to it, I would dare to be as brave as you were then.

Regards, Suzette Hermsen - neighbor of your daughter