Kindjeshaven

Look at this building on the Prins Hendriklaan. Today it houses an ice cream salon, but during the Second World War, something quietly extraordinary happened here. A young law student named Trui van Lier transformed this villa into a children's refuge called Kindjeshaven, officially a neighborhood daycare, secretly a lifeline for Jewish children.

Trui had grown up in a Jewish family that sheltered German refugees in the 1930s. When the war came, she knew exactly how vulnerable children became once their parents were taken away. Together with Jet Berdenis van Berlekom, a trained childcare worker, she built a cover that was convincing enough to fool the world around them. They took in children from well-off neighbors, built a reputation for reliability, and gradually began sheltering Jewish children whose parents had gone into hiding or been deported.

The villa sat in a neighborhood filled with German soldiers and Dutch Nazi collaborators, making every day a careful balancing act. In 1944, the house was raided, but Jet managed to talk her way through it. The refuge kept running until February 1945, when a lack of water, electricity, and basic supplies finally forced them to close. More than 150 children survived because two young women refused to look away.