The special working method of the resistance group allowed the members to stay under the radar. “Her father had warned her: ‘Never use names. Do not walk with a list in your pocket that says that Pietje lives in the Marnixstraat'”, her cousin Paul van Tongeren told the program last week. Speech makers on NPO Radio 1.
Van Tongeren took that advice to heart: all data of the members and the people in hiding were encrypted with numbers. “2000” was Van Tongeren’s code: the letter “T” is the twentieth letter of the alphabet, and as founder she was “00”. In the statue she has the code key in her hand, with which all names and addresses of the members and people in hiding can be traced.
Men claimed the resistance
Due to the anonymous nature of the group, Van Tongeren’s story remained unknown for a long time. “Everyone knew her as ‘2000’, nobody says anything. Had it been the Van Tongeren group, it might have been different.”
The fact that she was a woman also played a role, her cousin says. “After the war, men in the resistance often claimed, ‘I did it,’ and the woman was cornered,” he says.
“She also contributed to the establishment of the illegal magazine Vrij Nederland. Van Randwijk became the editor-in-chief, a great man in the resistance. In 1944 he said: ‘A woman cannot lead a resistance group, I’ll take it over.’ But she refused. She clashed with the men, so she stayed under the radar.”
Thousands of receipts in her vest
In addition to being ‘2000’, Van Tongeren was also known as the ‘coupon queen’; in a vest made especially for her, she could smuggle in five thousand food stamps. When members of her vigilante group raided a distribution center, she would stop by to fill the bags with coupons. “She looked like a pregnant woman with that coat on. So a German officer once stood up for her in an Amsterdam tram,” says her cousin.
The statue serves as a tribute to all members of the resistance group. The names of the members are on a plaque. About two hundred descendants are present at the unveiling.
Although Van Tongeren herself is no longer anonymous, the identity of some members is still unknown, says her cousin. “We don’t know anything about about twenty members. We do have a name, but sometimes not even a first name. Then you only know ‘Bakker’, and then you won’t get very far.”
On a website about Jacoba van Tongeren contains the biographies of fifty members. Paul van Tongeren hopes that descendants of the anonymous members will recognize stories, and that the other members can also be brought out of obscurity.
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