09/07/2026
Adolf Eichmann told her she could take 600 Jewish children out of Vienna—perhaps believing the conditions he imposed would make it impossible.
Within days, Truus Wijsmuller had them on a train to safety.
It was December 1938.
Austria was under N**i rule, and only weeks earlier, Kristallnacht had made the growing persecution of Jewish people terrifyingly clear.
Synagogues had been burned. Businesses had been destroyed. People had been arrested and attacked.
For many Jewish parents, one desperate hope remained: if they could not escape themselves, perhaps they could at least get their children out.
Britain had agreed to accept Jewish children from territories threatened by N**i Germany as part of what became known as the Kindertransport. But between those children and safety stood borders, permits, paperwork, trains—and N**i officials.
That was when a Dutch woman named Geertruida “Truus” Wijsmuller-Meijer traveled directly to Vienna.
She was not Jewish.
She was not a soldier.
She was a volunteer who helped refugees, and she had developed a reputation for confronting seemingly impossible problems and finding a way through them.
In Vienna, she came face to face with Adolf Eichmann, who would later become one of the principal organizers of the Holocaust.
According to Truus’s later account, Eichmann attempted to intimidate and humiliate her during their meeting.
She endured it.
Then she told him why she had come.
She wanted permission to take Jewish children out of Austria.
Eichmann reportedly laughed and gave her what he may have considered an impossible challenge: she could take 600 children, provided she organized the transport within only a few days.
Truus accepted.
What followed was a race against time.
Hundreds of Jewish parents in Vienna faced an almost unimaginable decision: placing their children in the care of strangers and sending them away, without knowing whether they would ever see them again.
Meanwhile, Truus worked through permits, documents, inspections, transportation, and countless logistical obstacles.
The children were ready.
And the train left Vienna.
Six hundred young lives were moving away from immediate danger.
But Truus did not stop there.
She continued traveling across a Europe that was becoming more dangerous by the month, arranging further transports and searching for foster families, orphanages, trains, ships, and countries willing to accept refugee children.
Sometimes she even sheltered children in her own home.
One of them was Ilse Bauer-Langsdorf, who was only two years old.
Truus arranged for Ilse to travel to Aruba, where she was supposed to join a foster family. But the ship carrying her struck German mines, and more than 100 people lost their lives.
Ilse survived.
Truus cared for her while she recovered—and then began searching for another way to get her to safety.
The following year, she found another ship.
This time, Ilse reached her destination.
Then, on May 10, 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands.
Truus was in Paris.
She could have remained away from the danger.
Instead, she returned to Amsterdam.
There were still children who needed help.
On May 14, as the Netherlands was surrendering to Germany, Truus helped evacuate children from an Amsterdam orphanage and arranged for them to leave aboard a ship bound for England.
It was reportedly her 74th organized transport.
Even the N**i occupation did not completely stop her work.
She was arrested and questioned by the Gestapo, yet continued assisting Jewish people with food, medicine, documents, and escape efforts.
The exact number of people Truus helped save remains difficult to establish. Historical accounts credit her with helping thousands of children, while some estimates place the number of people she assisted as high as 10,000.
Many of those children never even knew the name of the woman who had helped arrange the journey that carried them away from danger.
In 1966, Yad Vashem recognized Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer as Righteous Among the Nations.
She died in 1978 at the age of 82.
Only over time, through archives, testimonies, and historical research, did the full scale of her work become better understood.
One of the children she helped later remembered that after the war, Truus took her onto her lap and called her “my child.”
Perhaps that small memory says as much about her as the extraordinary numbers do.
In 1938, Truus Wijsmuller walked into the office of a N**i official who would later play a central role in organizing the deportation of millions of Jews.
She had no army behind her.
She carried no weapon.
She walked out with permission to take 600 children away.
And when she was given conditions that seemed impossible, she did not waste time arguing that they could not be met.
She went to organize the train.
