On May 5th, the Netherlands marks Liberation Day, commemorating the country’s freedom from Nazi occupation in 1945. It is a day of national reflection, a time to honor not only the soldiers and strategists but also the lesser-acknowledged forces of liberation: the women whose courage, resolve, and vision shaped both wartime resistance and the nation’s postwar identity. Their stories are not footnotes to history but central chapters in the narrative of freedom.
Among the most iconic figures in Dutch resistance is Hannie Schaft, a law student turned freedom fighter whose red hair became a symbol of defiance. Born in 1920 into a progressive Haarlem household, Schaft envisioned a future in human rights law. That vision was upended when the Nazi occupation began. As persecution of Jewish citizens intensified, Schaft’s sense of moral obligation galvanized her into action. She maintained friendships with Jewish classmates, secured false identification papers for them, and later joined the communist Resistance Council.
Schaft didn’t just support resistance efforts, she embodied them. She participated in at least six targeted assassinations, including high-ranking collaborators and Nazi officials. Her operations were often carried out on a bicycle, her weapon hidden in her bag, her resolve undeterred. Before missions, she would apply lipstick and mascara. “I’ll die clean and beautiful,” she once told fellow fighter Truus Oversteegen.
Her life was cut short just weeks before the war’s end. Captured during a random checkpoint in Haarlem, she was executed in the dunes near Bloemendaal. The bullet first fired at her ricocheted off her skull. A second shot at close range ended her life. She was 24.
The Oversteegen sisters, Truus and Freddie, were only teenagers when they joined the resistance. Their methods were unconventional and disarming. They would approach Nazi soldiers in bars, flirt to gain their trust, and then lure them to the woods where they were ambushed. Their youth provided them with both cover and paradox: perceived as harmless, they wielded their innocence as a tactical weapon.
The sisters survived the war, though not unscathed. In letters discovered decades later, Truus described their haunting memories and bond with Schaft. Unlike the sanitized heroines of postwar myth, these women were deeply human; traumatized, proud, and profoundly shaped by what they had done.
While Schaft and the Oversteegens fought through direct action, Mies Boissevain-van Lennep contributed through vision. A resistance member herself, imprisoned with her family for their activism, Boissevain emerged from Ravensbrück concentration camp with a singular idea: to channel postwar rebuilding through a unifying act of creativity.
She called it the nationale feestrok, or liberation skirt. The idea was simple but profound. Women across the Netherlands would sew skirts from scraps of fabric, each piece representing a personal or national story from the war years. Some pieces came from children's clothing, others from old uniforms or household linens. The result was a mosaic of resilience and renewal.
The skirts were worn during national holidays and liberation celebrations, turning garments into declarations. A skirt could be both private and political, decorative and defiant.
More than 4,000 feestrokken were registered and displayed. Boissevain's vision was both feminist and civic: women, often relegated to the sidelines of formal memorial culture, became central to how the nation remembered and moved forward.
The liberation skirt is more than an artifact; it is a metaphor for the broader contribution of women to national identity. Just as each patch was stitched with care and intention, so too were the contributions of resistance fighters, caregivers, artists, and intellectuals stitched into the fabric of postwar Dutch society.
This tradition also invites reflection for contemporary leaders. What does it mean to unify in diversity? How do we preserve memory not through statues or textbooks, but through acts of collective creation?
In a world still fractured by ideological conflict and displacement, the legacy of these women offers a blueprint: one that combines courage with compassion, defiance with dignity.
Today, when we speak of leadership, the examples we draw from often skew corporate or political. Yet the women of the Dutch resistance remind us that leadership can also be quiet, decentralized, and profoundly personal. Whether through coded messages passed between safe houses, or fabric stitched into a skirt, their influence endures.
Sources
Dutch liberation skirts by Insitute on gender equality and women’s history
