student and resistance fighter Anda Kerkhoven

It must have been dark when at eight o’clock in the evening on March 19, 1945, more than three weeks before the liberation of Groningen, a German jeep drove south on the Hereweg. Before the village of Glimmen the car turned right and stopped a little further in the Quintusbos.

Three Dutch members of the Security Service (SD) and their two passengers got out and walked along a sandy path into the forest, the latter in the lead. Then gunshots rang out in quick succession. Gerrit Boekhoven – alias Henk de Groot, leader of the resistance group De Groot – and RUG student Anda Kerkhoven, a member of that group, were dead.

Their bodies were placed in a hastily dug hole and covered. In June 1945, months after the liberation, the grave was found on the instructions of one of the SD members and their bodies were identified.

Double murder

The cold-blooded double murder is described in the booklet Anda Kerkhoven, a student in the Groningen resistance of father René (1950) and son Jesper (1992) Westra, both once students at the RUG: father studied biology there in the 1960s, son history about forty years later.

The more we learned, the greater our admiration for this woman

~ The Authors

The short but intensive life of the resistance fighter fascinated father Westra when he attended a lecture about Kerkhoven in the Academy Building years ago. The enthusiasm passed on to son Jesper and together they delved into the archives, resulting in the booklet.

“The more we learned, the greater our admiration for this young woman with such principled non-violent views, which ultimately cost her her life,” they write in the introduction.

Dutch East Indies

Anda Kerkhoven – her full name was Melisande Tatiana Marie – was only 25 years old when she was shot dead; a few weeks later she would have turned 26. In 1938 she came to Groningen from the Dutch East Indies, where her wealthy parents had a cinchona and rubber company in Java.

That was not a coincidence, but a choice – albeit not entirely voluntary. In 1937 she started studying medicine at the Medical College of Batavia, now Jakarta. But Kerkhoven, who was a convinced vegetarian, refused to conduct animal testing. The RUG was the only university in the Netherlands that allowed her to study without having to undergo vivisection.

She moved into a room above a bicycle shop at Oude Kijk in ‘t Jatstraat 20 and joined the Groningen Female Student Club Magna Pete.

She was a striking appearance in the Groningen student world and also a bit of an outsider. This was due to her Indian appearance (her paternal grandmother was a Chinese-Indian woman, as the Westras discovered in the archives) but certainly also due to her drive. She was so principled that in the eyes of her fellow students she lived ‘a little outside reality’.

Student magazine

Soon after arriving in Groningen, she started writing for the student magazine Der Clercke Cronike, in which she vented about issues that bothered her and worried her. That was also about pre-war Nazi Germany.

She wrote in 1938: ‘In Germany the persecution of the Jews is approved by the majority of the population. An example of insanity. Anyone who wants to prolong his own life through injustice and violence is throwing away his own honor. What is not allowed is not allowed, whatever the price.’ And then in the closing sentence she returns to one of her own sacred principles: ‘Vivisection is also not allowed!’

What is not allowed is not allowed, whatever the price

~ Anda Kerkhoven

The often uncompromising positions she proclaimed in Der Clercke Cronike were not always well received, especially when she continued to defend non-violence after Austria and the Sudetenland were annexed by Nazi Germany and a new European war seemed inevitable. For her, pacifism, she stated, was not ‘not being able to see blood’, but a ‘sense of justice and honor and a love for natural beauty’.

‘I love freedom. More than many patriots, but I hate fighting, because war is not waged against tyrants personally but against victims, conscripted soldiers,” she wrote. Followed by her famous phrase: ‘No tyrant will be able to force me to obey him, nor to commit moral suicide by using methods of struggle against him or his slaves that I abhor.’

Respect

RUG historian Klaas van Berkel, author of University of the North: four centuries of academic life in Groningendescribed Kerkhoven as someone who ‘lived out of respect for all life’, but also as someone ‘who says and does the right things for the wrong reasons’: ‘Communists would say: a useful idiot.’

Too simplistic, the authors write. ‘Anda indeed took very principled positions and always took into account the ultimate consequence: death.’

Nevertheless, they also crack a critical note on another piece they advocated Der Clercke wrote, in which she made a well-intentioned attempt to speak up for the Jews, but at the same time fell into the anti-Semitic trap of Nazi propaganda.

Anda has always taken the utmost consequence into account

~ The Authors

In it she tells how Jews, because they have always been persecuted, were forced to ‘try to gain power through money…’ She was met with a strong response. ‘A true showcase of nonsense’, one reader responded, ‘The writer demonstrates here an example of anti-Semitism, which even comrade Julius Streicher (the infamous publisher of the extremely anti-Semitic Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer – ed.) would take credit for.’

Even when the Germans invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, Kerkhoven remained faithful to its pacifist ideals. ‘He who can risk his life for military defense can also risk it for pacifist defense!’ she wrote in one of her last pieces Der Clerckewhich was dissolved by the German occupiers in 1941.

In the same year, Kerkhoven completed her studies with honors. It is not entirely clear how she ended up in the resistance around that time. The authors believe that the initial impetus came from her contacts within the Social Democratic Student Club. Later she moved to De Ranitzstraat 3a, where she lived with the couple Karel and Else Hendriks, who were part of the De Groot resistance group.

Capital punishment

Even then, she still had no interest in violence. She helped distribute illegal pamphlets, occasionally wrote them herself, distributed food vouchers and forged identity cards and accompanied people wanted by the German occupier to their hiding place. “Activities that, despite their non-violence, were punishable by death,” the authors write.

Things went well for years. But through a combination of chance and betrayal, the Germans tracked her down. On December 27, 1944, at the beginning of the evening, four armed SD members entered the house on De Ranitzstraat. When Kerkhoven came home an hour later, she found four guns pointed at her. She was taken away in handcuffs, together with the Hendriks couple.

She was put in a cell in the House of Detention on the Helperlinie, now part of the Van Mesdag Clinic. There she was interrogated countless times, called katjang (Indonesian peanut) because of her Indian appearance, harassed and tortured. But she didn’t say anything.

Yet shortly afterwards, on January 12, 1945, resistance leader Gerrit Boekhoven (alias Henk de Groot) was also arrested. It meant the end of the resistance group; one after another fell into the hands of the SD. Although the war would only last a few months, less than ten of the thirty members survived the war.

Anda Kerkhoven was reburied on June 22 at the Noordercemetery in Groningen, in the presence of many students and employees of the university. In the memorial speech, Rector Magnificus Cobertus Willem van der Pot said that she was the only female student executed by the Germans for resistance activities. In 1967, her remains were transferred to the honorary cemetery for war victims in Loenen.

‘Anda Kerkhoven, a student in the Groningen resistance’, by René and Jesper Westra, with a foreword by former rector Cisca Wijmenga. Price: 24.50 euros. ISBN: 97890 5452 431 1 / NUR 681. Passage Publishers.