Tina Strobos

Tina Strobos (born 1920) is a retired (May 2009) physician and child psychiatrist who, while a medical student during World War II living in Amsterdam, helped shelter more than 100 Jewish refugees as part of the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands. In 2009, Strobos was honored for her work by the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center of New York.

Background

Strobos comes from a family of socialist atheists who took in Belgian and Austrian refugees during and after World War I. Strobos was well-educated and fluent in German. At one time Strobos had a Jewish fiance, Abraham Paris, whom she did not marry and who went on to become a particle physicist.

Holocaust

Strobos, together with her mother and grandmother, sheltered over 100 Jewish refugees—four or five at a time—at their boarding house at 282 Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, only a ten-minute walk from Anne Frank's house at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdram. The refugees stayed on the upper floors and attic of the family's boarding house, where there was also a secret compartment for hiding two or three people. She hid an Orthodox couple with five children and helped others, including a prominent Impressionist, Martin Monnickendam (1874–1943).

Strobos also carried news and ration stamps to Jews hiding on farms outside the city, as well as radios and firearms for the Dutch resistance. She was seized or questioned nine times by the Gestapo.

Her grandmother had a radio transmitter hidden in the house which was used to send clandestine messages from the underground to Britain. After the war, she emigrated to the United States. Strobos said of her grandmother, "She is the only person I know who scared the Gestapo."

In a 2009 interview Strobos said "It's just the right thing to do. I believe in heroism, and when you're young, you want to do dangerous things." In recent decades, she has spoken out against the torture of terrorists, which she said was ineffective as well as cruel.