The fallen resistance people in Limburg

Anna Debije
(Maria Josepha Hubertina Anna)

Anna Debije is the widow of Giel Duijkers. The couple did, as often happened, their resistance work together. But as always in such cases: Giel was in front (he was the local contact for the LO in Heer) and had to pay for it with his life. But that does not mean in this case, that Anna was not also severely mistreated, because the traitor Reuten knew, that she was involved in the resistance too. She is the first survivor outside Valkenburg to be included in this database. Because in most cases it is difficult to obtain data about survivors. That is different here, because she wrote herself, see the letter, of which the first page is reproduced below. But first the story.
For a detailed account of the events below, see struikelsteentjes-maastricht.nl. [1]
On July 4, 1944, the chief constable of the police, A.B. Reuten, rang the doorbell and asked Mrs. Duijkers if he could use the telephone. Inside the house he saw some copies of the banned newspaper Trouw on the table and managed to gain her trust. She did not know that Reuten was a fanatical National Socialist. She asked him if he would be willing to temporarily take in H. Oppenheim, a Jewish man in hiding. He agreed, picked up the person in hiding later, and immediately delivered him to the SiPo, who interrogated him under torture. Then he tried to find out from whom she had received the illegal newspapers and who was involved in helping the Jews. In the course of July, the Sipo arrested two distributors of the newspaper Trouw, J.W. van Heyst and F.A. Erkamp from Heer, as well as the helper of Jews, J.H.M. Speetjens, and the couple Guillaume Duijkers and Anna Duijkers-Debije. Van Heyst and Erkamp were released after a few weeks. Duijkers died in Sachsenhausen on February 23, 1945, and Speetjens in Mauthausen on March 5, 1945. [3]
The arrest of Guillaume Duijkers and probably his wife Anna, as well as the other victims of Reuten, took place on July 7, 1944. [4]
On April 18, 1958, Anna wrote to the mayor that she too had been severely tortured by the SiPo in Maastricht and by Reuten:
Dear Sir,
I am enclosing the information you requested. My husband was forced to work in the Henkel factories in Sachsenhausen, I myself was also imprisoned for eleven months in Vught, Ravensbrück and Dachau, among other places.
As always, I am still Dutch and have done what I could with love and in fulfillment of my duty. Unfortunately, I was betrayed by A. Reuten, the interrogations were very tough, as you probably know, I was also interrogated by this scoundrel, who still calls himself Dutch, and he tried to find out everything with the meanest tricks, but thank God I stood firm. You understand what that meant, and I was terribly mistreated by those executioners, but in those moments I would rather have died than betray one of our own. My teeth were knocked out and I still have scars on my legs from the kicks of the Nazi boots.
But don’t you find it deeply sad that a guy like that is free again? In Amsterdam the sentence was 20 years and in Leeuwarden 25 years and the fact that he is now free is very sad. [2#3]

On November 27, 1961, she moved to Tenessee (USA), where her son L.G.H. Duijkers already had been living since 1957. [2#6]
She died on February 19, 1968 in the St. Elisabethsgasthuis in Arnhem [5.1][5.2] and was buried in Meerssen, next to her older brother Hubert. This tomb has been removed. [5.3]
She herself and her family spell their surname Debije, but some documents say Debeije. Let’s assume that the family knows it better.

Footnotes

1. struikelsteentjes-maastricht.nl LO-Heer & Giel Duijkers
2. Archief Oorlogsgravenstichting (@ Nationaal archief),
   Dossier Giel Duijkers #3
3. Dr. F. Cammaert, Het Verborgen Front – Geschiedenis van de georganiseerde illegaliteit in de provincie Limburg tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Doctorale scriptie 1994, Groningen
   6. De Landelijke Organisatie voor hulp aan onderduikers • VIII-IX, p.653
4. forum.mestreechonline.nl Verzetsstrijders Maastricht
5. 1. Bidprentje, Im Memoriam card
   2. Wikipedia NL Elisabeths Gasthuis (Arnhem)
   3. ††† Meerssen Graf Nr 22.06