Young girls and women secretly delivered banned Dutch newspaper during WWII occupation

About 10 percent of the young women who secretly delivered the then-illegal newspaper Trouw during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War were teenage girls. These girls and women distributed the newspaper, did other courier work, and helped people in hiding, Trouw reports after researching the ‘women of Trouw.’

The newspaper found 300 resistance women for which it had enough evidence to prove their efforts for the underground newspaper. About 10 percent were between 12 and 18. At least twelve were younger. Trouw was founded in 1943 as a newspaper for the Reformed population. It was one of the largest illegal newspapers of the time.

One of these kids was Cokky de Hoop, now 88. She distributed the newspaper in Voorburg at age 9. “I had newspapers under my clothes and was not allowed to run, but was allowed to skip. I had to pay close attention when someone arrived, didn’t ring a doorbell, and calmly walked around the block. I was very aware of the threats and the danger.”

Looking back, she calls it “quite dangerous” that she was used for this “But as a child you were simply less suspicious.” And although it was quite frightening, she is still happy that she could contribute to the resistance. “It’s not that I couldn’t sleep. It was just my job. I think many more children from resistance families had such jobs. I never took it so seriously.”

The average age of the “women of Trouw” was 27. Almost 40 percent fell into the 18 to 25 age range.