Nazi resistor still speaking at schools

By LAURA BEHENNA, Bigfork Eagle

Life was quiet for Hanneke Ippisch last week in her colorfully decorated home on a peninsula near Big Arm. But not for long.

The lively, 80-something woman is preparing to travel to Hood River, Ore., for her latest round of speaking engagements about her extraordinary past. She’ll meet hundreds of schoolchildren and share the story of the career she started nearly 65 years ago: helping Jews escape execution by the Nazis during Word War II.

It was 1943, and the Nazis had occupied Ippisch’s home country, Holland, for three years. She had finished high school and started classes at a physical education academy. One night she overheard a conversation between her father, who was a minister, and a woman she didn’t know. The woman was clearly a member of the Dutch Resistance, the organized civilian forces who were working to undermine German rule, to deliver Jews from persecution and to prepare Holland for a Nazi-free future.

Ippisch quietly followed the woman to her home and asked to join the Resistance. The woman urged her to reconsider-, but Ippisch insisted.

“On that day, my life changed completely,” she wrote in her memoir of her experiences, titled “Sky: A True Story of Courage During World War II.”

“At night I was told where to meet my contact the next morning to receive new instructions, and which code words to use when approaching him or her,” Ippisch wrote. “I was given a different assignment each day, transporting Jewish people from one place to another, safer spot. Often we had to separate children from their parents. I traveled with the children on trains and boats to the countryside, where the Germans rarely went.

“Quite a few of those children - unaware of their families’ fate - stayed in the countryside until the end of the war in 1945. Many of the farmers’ families ‘adopted’ the Jewish children and treated them as their own.”

Sometimes the Germans spotted and captured Jews as they tried to make their way to safety, and their Resistance-provided escorts had to pretend not to know them, but Ippisch and her charges made every trip safely.

The next year, however, Resistance forces organized a total shutdown of the railroad system in Holland in an effort to hamper the Germans’ ability to control the country. The Germans retaliated by clamping down on food and fuel supplies, which were already scarce. Without railroad travel, Jews in hiding had to stay where they were. Ippisch found another job as a Resistance courier.

Each Friday morning, the key leaders of the nine branches of the Dutch Resistance met in Amsterdam to coordinate their plans and activities. Ippisch’s job included finding a new, obscure meeting place every week, as well as bringing something for the leaders to eat and some coal for heat. They had to move around to elude detection by the Germans.

Sometimes she went home to visit her family in a nearby town. Her father and sister were busy hiding Jews and Resistance workers - even a secret radio transmitter - in their house. The Germans left the family alone because they assumed it was normal for a minister to receive many visitors, especially during wartime.

Ippisch didn’t find out until after the war just how deeply her father, Jan Eikema, had been involved in Resistance activities. He, in turn, had no idea what she was up to until afterward. Resistance volunteers learned to keep their activities secret even from their families.

“We couldn’t talk about it,” she said. “It just wasn’t safe.”

“The Jews called my father the ‘honorary rabbi of Amsterdam,’” she added. “He was a fantastic guy.”

One of her riskiest assignments was to carry a package containing about $3 million in cash 60 miles to a town where the money would fund Resistance activities. Only the Germans had fuel for motorized vehicles - no public transportation ran anymore - so she had to ride her bicycle. When a German truck slowed down for her, she grabbed a handle and let the truck pull her along for the next two hours. She reached her destination before the German-imposed 7 p.m. curfew.

One Friday morning in January 1945 Ippisch climbed the steps to a narrow house on one of Amsterdam’s canal-lined streets, carrying a basket of bread and coal for the Resistance leaders’ weekly meeting.

Two burly German officers met her at the door. They escorted her and the captured leaders to prison, where she stayed for the next three months, when the war ended. Most of the leaders were executed. Ippisch narrowly escaped being sent to a concentration camp.

“That was not cool,” is how Ippisch sums up her prison experience. She doesn’t like to discuss it in detail, although she did describe how a German interrogator badgered her with questions one day. When she gave the same answers over and over, he whispered commands to two large, snarling dogs. The dogs kept inching closer until they were biting bits of flesh from her legs, but she kept quiet. Finally the frustrated officer sent her back to her cell.

She and her three cell-mates got bread and thin soup to eat, just enough to keep them alive. They noticed an odd, distinctive flavor in the food. Later they learned it was camphor, which was then the main ingredient in mothballs. The Germans believed camphor would make the women prisoners sterile, she said.

“We didn’t know that, so we ate it,” she said.

On the day the defeated enemy released her from prison, Ippisch had no alternative but to walk the 32 miles back to her family’s home, but by a stroke of luck she met an old friend on the street in Amsterdam and got a ride home on the back of her friend’s bicycle.

The end of the war didn’t end Ippisch’s adventures. She worked as a “cheer-up nurse” at the Dutch queen’s palace, half of which the queen converted into pleasant rooms for concentration camp and prison survivors who needed a few months of rest and relaxation. She also did a brief stint as a leader at a prison camp for people who had collaborated with the Nazis during the war. A surviving Resistance leader offered her a job escorting Jews from Europe to Israel, but the young woman was ready for a more peaceful life.

She took a job as an English tutor for a wealthy family in Sweden. She and one of the family’s sons married and moved to Oakland, Calif., where her husband worked as a chemist and she took her children to marches against the Vietnam war. Her husband’s job transferred them to Missoula in the 1960s, introducing her to the tranquility of Montana - and eventually to her new husband, Les Ippisch, a forest technician at the ranger station where they both worked.

These days Ippisch would rather talk about her husband, “my man,” who died last year, and about her daughter Hedvig, an award-winning artist who died last month of breast cancer, than about her youth in the Resistance. It’s understandable, given that she has spent much of the last 10 years traveling around the U.S., speaking at numerous classrooms in more than 300 schools - she’s lost count - about those days.

“It’s wonderful,” she said of her opportunities to teach youth about her years fighting hate crimes. “They write me hundreds of letters. And they all ask ‘Can you please come back and go to all the other schools around us too?’ Isn’t that cool?”