Louisa Steenstra paid dearly for her heroism—with her husband’s life. Louisa and Albert Steenstra (a winery manager) built a concealed chamber in a closet of their home in the Dutch city of Groningen. In that tiny space the couple secreted two Jews and a Dutch Resistance fighter. For more than a year, a Jewish businessman and his brother also shared the space.
By January 1945 all but one of the Steenstras’ wards had left the house and were relocated by the Resistance. But the family had a new worry—a Dutch couple billeted in one of their downstairs rooms by the local authorities. One day the couple let slip word of the illegal tenant to a Dutch policeman they took for a friend. Soon after, an SS officer tipped off by the policeman came storming into the house behind a barking police dog. In the secret chamber he found the Jewish refugee. The officer shot him and Louisa’s husband dead.
Grabbing her 4-year-old daughter, Beatrix, Louisa ran out the door and fled to the underground. The two of them spent the remaining months of the war hiding in an attic with five other people.
When Canadian troops liberated the Netherlands, Louisa denounced the Dutch policeman who had brought the SS to her house. “He first got the death penalty,” she says. “But later it was changed to 20 years.”
Now 77, Louisa lives in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Why did she help? “I have asked myself that question a hundred times,” she admits. “Because I felt sorry. And I hated the Germans for what they did. I never regretted anything. We did it of our own freewill.”
People Magazine
“Professor Sam Oliner Studies the Brave Souls Who Saved Him -and Many Others-from the Nazis”
December 02, 1985, Vol. 24, No. 23