Tina Strobos, 1920–2012

last updated 8 January 2015

One of Tina Strobos’s lasting regrets was that she wasn’t able to save Anne Frank. The house in occupied Amsterdam that concealed Frank and her family until they were betrayed to the Germans in 1944 was just blocks from where Strobos hid more than 100 Jews over the course of the war. “If I knew they were there,” she said of the teenage diarist’s family, “I would have gotten them out of the country.”

Strobos was born Tineke Buchter in Amsterdam, said The Washington Post, and studied medicine until war broke out in 1940. She soon began helping the underground resistance obtain guns, explosives, and radios, “hiding them in her bicycle basket” over 50-mile journeys. She and her mother turned their three-story town house into a “stop on the underground railroad,” handing out food, medical care, and forged passports to refugees.

One day a Dutch carpenter turned up at their door, said The New York Times, and built a secret compartment in the house’s attic. “A changing cast of Jews, communists, and other endangered individuals” passed through the hidden room over the following years. The Gestapo searched the house repeatedly, interrogating Strobos nine times. But her fluency in German and her “cool, ingenuous pose” convinced them that she had nothing to hide.

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Strobos immigrated to America after the war and settled in Westchester, N.Y., where she worked as a psychiatrist, said the Westchester Journal News. She never regretted her risky wartime exploits. “Your conscience tells you to do it,” she said. “I believe in heroism, and when you’re young you want to do dangerous things.”