Americans Against Authoritarianism

She refused to sign loyalty to the N***s and lost her university degree. So she joined the resistance, dyed her red hair black, and became one of Holland's deadliest fighters.
Jannetje Johanna Schaft was born on September 16, 1920, in Haarlem, Netherlands, to parents who raised her in a home filled with political discussion and social justice. Her father Pieter, a teacher, was an active socialist. Her mother Aafje, a Mennonite with strong Christian Socialist beliefs, encouraged her daughter to think critically about the world.
Young Johanna—called "Jo" by her family—grew up bookish and shy, with one distinguishing feature that made her the target of childhood teasing: bright red hair.
Her parents were intensely protective of her. When Jo was seven, her older sister Annie died of diphtheria. The loss devastated the family, and from that point forward, the Schafts watched over their only remaining child with fierce devotion.
But they also taught her to stand for what was right.
In 1938, at 18, Jo enrolled in law school at the University of Amsterdam. She dreamed of becoming a human rights lawyer. At university, she made two close friends: Philine P***k and Sonja Frenk, both Jewish students.
Those friendships would change everything.
In May 1940, N**i Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands. Almost overnight, Jewish citizens faced escalating persecution. Jo watched in horror as her friends were stripped of rights, forced to wear yellow stars, banned from public spaces.
At first, her resistance was small. She stole identity cards and ration coupons for Jewish people, including her friends, helping them survive the N**i occupation.
Then the N***s demanded that all university students sign a declaration of allegiance to the occupation authorities.
Jo Schaft refused.
The consequences were immediate: she could no longer continue her studies. Her dream of becoming a human rights lawyer evaporated. She was 21 years old, and the Germans had just stolen her future.
She moved back home with her parents in Haarlem.
And she decided to fight back.
By 1943, Jo had joined the Raad van Verzet—the Council of Resistance—a group with ties to the Dutch Communist Party. She wasn't a communist, but she joined them for one simple reason: they were actively resisting. They weren't just hiding or hoping—they were fighting.
The resistance gave her a new name: Hannie.
Hannie Schaft was born.
She learned to handle weapons. She already spoke fluent German—now she refined her accent until she could pass for a native speaker. She carried out courier work, transporting illegal newspapers and weapons between resistance cells. She gathered intelligence on German defenses.
And then she began carrying out assassinations.
Hannie and her fellow resistance fighters—including sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen—targeted N**i officers and Dutch collaborators. They weren't killing for revenge. They were eliminating people who were sending Dutch Jews to death camps, who were hunting resistance members, who were collaborating with an evil regime.
Hannie was tested early. To prove her commitment, resistance leaders ordered her to assassinate a member of the German Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst). She took aim and fired—unknowingly shooting a rubber bullet at a fellow resistance member in a staged test.
She passed. From that point forward, she was trusted with the most dangerous missions.
Because she spoke perfect German, Hannie was especially valuable. She could walk right up to German soldiers and engage them in conversation, gathering information, appearing harmless—then disappearing before they realized what had happened.
Some Dutch people, seeing her chat with German soldiers, assumed she was a collaborator—a "moffenmeid," the derogatory term for Dutch women who fraternized with the enemy. They had no idea she was one of the resistance's most effective operatives.
Hannie carried out multiple assassinations on a bicycle, riding alongside Dutch traitors and N**i collaborators before pulling out a pistol and firing. She sabotaged German operations. She helped create detailed maps of German coastal fortifications—intelligence that was sent to London and used for a successful RAF bombing raid on German submarine facilities in March 1944.
The Germans hunted her relentlessly. But they didn't know her name or what she looked like—except for one detail: witnesses reported seeing "the girl with the red hair" at multiple attacks.
That bright red hair that had made her a target for teasing as a child had now made her a target for the Gestapo.
So Hannie dyed her hair black and began wearing heavy glasses as a disguise. She adopted fake identities with forged papers identifying her as "Johanna Elderkamp" from Zurich, Switzerland.
The disguise worked. The Germans continued searching for "the girl with the red hair" while Hannie moved freely through occupied territory, her black hair hiding her identity.
She refused certain missions on moral grounds. When asked to kidnap the children of a N**i official, she declined. If the plan failed, the children would have to be killed—and Hannie believed that was too similar to the N***s' own acts of terror. She would kill collaborators and enemy soldiers, but not children.
By early 1945, the war was nearing its end. Allied forces were closing in. Liberation was weeks away.
On March 21, 1945, Hannie was stopped at a routine military checkpoint in Haarlem. She was carrying copies of the illegal socialist newspaper "de Waarheid" (The Truth) and a pistol.
She was arrested.
Despite interrogations, torture, and solitary confinement, Hannie refused to reveal any information about the resistance. She gave them nothing.
But eventually, after weeks in captivity, someone noticed the roots of her hair growing back.
Red.
The N***s realized they had finally captured "the girl with the red hair" they'd been hunting for years.
On April 17, 1945—just three weeks before the Netherlands would be liberated—two men took Hannie to the dunes near Overveen, where hundreds of resistance fighters had already been executed and buried.
Mattheus Schmitz, a German officer, and Maarten Kuiper, a Dutch collaborator, walked her into the dunes. Schmitz raised his pistol and shot her in the head at close range.
The bullet grazed her. Hannie screamed in pain.
According to some accounts—though historians debate whether this actually happened—she said to her executioners: "I shoot better than you."
Kuiper raised his submachine gun and fired. This time, the shots hit their target. Hannie Schaft fell to the ground.
She was 24 years old.
Eighteen days later, on May 5, 1945, the Netherlands was liberated.
After the war, 422 bodies were discovered in the dunes where Hannie had been executed. 421 were men. One was a woman: Hannie Schaft.
She was reburied with full honors at the Erebegraafplaats Bloemendaal, the Dutch Honorary Cemetery. Queen Wilhelmina attended the funeral and called Hannie "the symbol of the Resistance."
Hannie was posthumously awarded the Dutch Cross of Resistance—one of only 95 people to receive it. She received the Resistance Memorial Cross. General Eisenhower awarded her the Medal of Freedom.
In 1982, Queen Juliana unveiled a bronze statue of Hannie in Kenau Park in Haarlem. Schools and streets across the Netherlands bear her name.
Books and films have told her story, most famously the 1981 film "Het Meisje met het Rode Haar" (The Girl with the Red Hair).
For years after the war, Hannie's legacy was complicated by Cold War politics. Because the Communist Party celebrated her as an icon, authorities actually banned commemorations at her grave in 1951, fearing communist influence. It took decades before she was fully embraced as a national hero.
Today, Hannie Schaft is remembered as one of the greatest heroes of the Dutch resistance.
She was a law student who dreamed of fighting for human rights in courtrooms. When the N***s took that dream away, she fought for human rights with weapons instead.
She refused to sign loyalty to evil. She refused to abandon her Jewish friends. She refused to stay silent while her country was occupied.
At 24, she was executed three weeks before liberation—so close to freedom, yet denied the chance to see the world she'd fought to save.
But Hannie Schaft's courage echoes through history. Every year, the Netherlands honors her memory. Every person who learns her story understands what one young woman with red hair—and the determination to fight injustice—can accomplish.
She chose courage over fear. She chose resistance over compliance. She chose freedom over silence.
And she died proving that sometimes the bravest thing you can do is refuse to surrender, even when surrender seems inevitable.

In 1942, the guards at the intake center made a calculation that would eventually change history.

They stripped a 37-year-old psychiatrist of his coat.

They shaved his head.

They took away his name and replaced it with a number tattooed on his skin: 119,104.

Then they found a manuscript sewn into the lining of his jacket.

It was his life's work. It contained years of research, theories, and the manuscript he had hoped to publish.

The guards tore it up and threw it into the fire.

In their eyes, they had just erased the man.

They believed that by taking his dignity, his profession, his hair, and his words, they had reduced him to nothing more than a body waiting to expire.

But they were wrong.

They had stripped Viktor Frankl of everything he owned, but they had inadvertently forced him to discover the one thing that could never be taken away.

Viktor Frankl had not planned to be there.

Months earlier, in Vienna, he had held a golden ticket in his hand.

It was a visa to America.

He was a respected doctor with a growing practice and a beautiful wife named Tilly.

The visa was his escape hatch. It meant safety. It meant a career. It meant life.

But the visa covered only him, not his elderly parents.

He stood in his office, staring at the paper, paralyzed by the choice.

If he left, his parents would almost certainly be taken by the N***s. If he stayed, he would join them in the fire.

He looked at a piece of marble sitting on his desk, a fragment from a destroyed synagogue that his father had saved.

It was engraved with a single commandment: "Honor thy father and mother."

Viktor let the visa expire.

He stayed.

And soon, the knock on the door came.

He was sent to Theresienstadt, then Auschwitz, then Dachau.

The conditions were designed to kill not just the body, but the soul.

Men slept on wooden planks, nine to a bed. They were fed watery soup and stale bread. They worked in freezing mud until they collapsed.

But as a doctor, Frankl began to notice something strange in the barracks.

Death was everywhere, but it didn't always strike the weakest men first.

Strong men withered and died in days. Frail men, who looked like skeletons, somehow kept waking up morning after morning.

Frankl realized that men weren't just dying from typhus or starvation.

They were dying from a lack of meaning.

The camp doctors even had a term for it. They called it "give-up-itis."

It followed a predictable pattern.

A prisoner would stop washing. Then he would stop moving.

Then, he would do something that signaled the end: he would smoke his own ci******es.

Ci******es were the only currency in the camp. They could be traded for an extra bowl of soup—which meant another day of life.

When a man smoked his own cigarette, he was signaling that he no longer cared about tomorrow.

Usually, within 48 hours of smoking that cigarette, the man would be dead.

Frankl realized that survival wasn't just physical. It was spiritual.

"He who has a why to live for," Frankl whispered to himself, quoting Nietzsche, "can bear almost any how."

So, amidst the horror, Prisoner 119,104 began a quiet, invisible rebellion.

He couldn't save his manuscript, so he decided to rewrite it in his mind.

While marching in torn shoes through the snow, beaten by guards, he wasn't there.

He was in a warm lecture hall in Vienna.

He visualized the room. He saw the students. He heard the scratch of their pens.

He delivered lectures in his head about the psychology of the concentration camp.

He forced his mind to focus on a future that did not yet exist.

He thought of his wife, Tilly.

He didn't know where she was, or if she was even alive. But he held onto the image of her face.

He had mental conversations with her. He saw her smile. He let the love he felt for her become an anchor that the guards couldn't touch.

He began to help others find their anchors.

He would crawl to a man sobbing on the bunk next to him and ask a strange question.

" what is waiting for you?"

He didn't promise them they would survive. He couldn't lie.

Instead, he reminded them of the unfinished business of their lives.

One man had a daughter waiting in a foreign country. Frankl reminded him that she needed a father to return to her.

Another man was a scientist with a series of books he had yet to finish. Frankl reminded him that the work was waiting.

He gave them a reason to stand up for one more roll call.

In 1945, the camps were liberated.

Viktor Frankl emerged into the light. He weighed 85 pounds. His ribs pushed against his skin like a bird cage.

He was free.

But freedom brought a crushing blow.

He went home to Vienna and found... nothing.

Tilly was dead.

His mother was dead.

His father was dead.

His brother was dead.

Every single person he had stayed for, every person he had dreamed of during the long nights in the barracks, was gone.

He was entirely alone in the world.

It was the moment where he could have finally succumbed to the darkness. He had every reason to give up.

Instead, he went into a room and sat down.

And he began to write.

He wrote with a feverish intensity.

He poured the pain, the loss, and the lessons of the camps onto the page.

He reconstructed the manuscript the N***s had burned, but he added something new—the undeniable proof of his experience.

It took him nine days.

Nine days to write Man’s Search for Meaning.

He didn't write it to become famous. In fact, he originally wanted to publish it anonymously, using only his prisoner number: 119,104.

He didn't think anyone would care about the thoughts of a camp survivor.

Publishers rejected it at first. They said it was too depressing. They said people wanted to forget the war, not read about it.

But the book found its way into the world.

And then, something remarkable happened.

People started reading it. Not just historians or psychologists, but regular people.

A grieving widow read it and found the strength to get out of bed.

A bankrupt businessman read it and realized his life wasn't over just because his money was gone.

A student facing depression read it and found a reason to stay alive.

The book spread from hand to hand, from country to country.

It sold millions of copies. It was translated into dozens of languages.

The Library of Congress eventually named it one of the ten most influential books in American history.

Viktor Frankl lived until 1997.

He flew airplanes. He climbed mountains. He remarried and had a daughter.

He lived a life full of the meaning he had fought so hard to define.

But his greatest legacy wasn't the book itself.

It was the lesson he brought back from the abyss.

He proved that you can take everything from a human being.

You can take their wealth, their health, their family, and their freedom.

But there is one thing—the last of the human freedoms—that no guard, no government, and no tragedy can ever take away.

The freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

The freedom to choose your own way.

The N***s tried to reduce him to a number.

They tried to make him a victim of history.

Instead, Viktor Frankl turned his suffering into a lens that helped millions of people see the light.

He showed us that we are not defined by what the world does to us.

We are defined by what we do with what is left.