Tina Strobos, 1920–2012

The woman who saved dozens of Jews in WWII

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.

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