Emma Vroege

About: A courier of Joop Migchelsen's resistance group at Hulshorst, very probably the "Emmy", nineteen, who saw to the food at the forester's house Kijkuit in October 1944 and, ◐ by Hardy's "same party", while Murphy hid there. She was arrested on 13 January 1945, by Lavender's account.

Unit or role: Courier of Joop Migchelsen's group at Hulshorst (Lavender, The Evaders, snippets); "koerierster" (courier) in a Nunspeet book (the snippets); first of Migchelsen's helpers, for "food, clothing, comfort" (his file, p. 2); bearer of the Verzetsherdenkingskruis, the resistance commemoration cross (the register, p. 218).

Where: Rotterdam; Oudeweg 118, Hulshorst (1945); the forester's house Kijkuit, Leuvenumse Bos; a barracks at Ermelo (◐ January 1945); Boreelstraat 2b, Rotterdam (1946, if the same); Toronto (1992).

Evidence: ✓ her identity card of 4 June 1945, shown on her oral-history page; ✓ the register of bearers of the Verzetsherdenkingskruis, p. 218; ✓ Migchelsen's file, p. 2, and p. 4; ✓ Bram Baar's file, p. 5; ✓ Hardy; ◐ Emerson Lavender, The Evaders (1992), pp. 29–30 and 255–256, read only through the Internet Archive's text search (the snippets)

✓ Emma Wilhelmina Vroege was born at Rotterdam on 17 June 1925: her identity card, issued at Ermelo on 4 June 1945, gives "17 Juni 1925 Rotterdam" and her occupation as "steno-typiste" (shorthand typist), and is signed "E. W. Vroege" (her oral-history page, checked on the image). The register of bearers of the resistance commemoration cross gives the same birth date (the register, p. 218).

◐ Emerson Lavender's The Evaders (1992), a book of stories of Canadian airmen and their helpers, tells her story as "Emmy van Taack, now of Toronto", from her own words. The book could not be borrowed, so what follows is rebuilt from the Internet Archive's search snippets and has not been read on the page (the snippets):

• "Emmy van Taack was fourteen when the Germans bombed Rotterdam on May 14, 1940". Born in June 1925, she was fourteen that day.
• "By 1941 the bombings were so bad that my mother and sister and [I] moved to our country house", while "My father had to stay in the city because he was a teacher." The snippet's distance from Rotterdam is unreadable in the OCR ("|20").
• "[I] became actively involved in the Resistance when [I] was fifteen. Our country house was ideally situated as a place to hide people fleeing from the Germans." She was fifteen from June 1940 to June 1941.

• On the group:

  These people also needed ration cards, false papers and food, so a group of my friends got organized. Joop Migchelsen, aged nineteen, was our leader. We had people working at City Hall who would steal German rubber stamps for authorizing the required papers. My main job in the beginning was as a courier in a network that brought infor- mation from other parts of the country and carried it from village to village. My run was usually to Harderwijk from Hulshorst, about eight kilometres.

  — Emmy van Taack, in Emerson Lavender, The Evaders (1992), p. 29, from the Internet Archive's search snippets, not read on the page · the snippets

• Migchelsen was born on 16 February 1921, so he was nineteen until February 1941 (his file, p. 3; Joop Migchelsen).

• She carried the "mail" "on my body or on the bike", met the courier from the next village at a farmhouse, and knew the other couriers only by code name; she typed, so "we mimeographed the news and spread it throughout our small area".

• On weapons:

  We got weapons by air drop from Britain — sten guns and handguns. Joop and the boys would go out and get the crates when they were dropped and take them … to a little house in the woods where they would be buried for the time when we would need them.

  — Emmy van Taack, in Emerson Lavender, The Evaders (1992), pp. 29–30, from the Internet Archive's search snippets, not read on the page · the raw snippets

✓ Migchelsen's list of the people who helped him hide Allied men, filled in for the Americans in August 1945, names her first: "Miss Emma Wilhelmina VROEGE 118 Oude weg Hulshorst (food, clothing, comfort)", followed by H. Baar, "guard of the house where the pilots were sheltered", and Reinier Mooy, at the same address as hers, for "transport in the woods" (his file, p. 2). His typed English answers of 14 June list her again, with Balthazar Sibbes added (p. 4), and list the six men he sheltered, Murphy among them, in the half of a double house at Hierderweg 132, Hulshorst, lent to him for his underground work (p. 3); ◐ that house is probably Kijkuit, but Migchelsen does not name Kijkuit, so the join is ours (Adriaan de Kok).

James Hardy and Bernard Haller were brought to the forester's house Kijkuit in the Leuvenumse Bos by Bram Baar and Joop Migchelsen (Noordman's reading of Hardy's "BRAM" and "JOOP (?)") on the night of 12 October 1944 by the order of Hardy's report, which dates the search of the woods to 11 October and has them walk on through Vierhouten that night and meet the underground the next evening (Hardy; Noordman, p. 278). Hardy told MI9 who he found there:

In this house there was Eric BLOK, formerly a 2/Lt. in the Dutch Army and now a member of the Underground; EMMY, a girl of 19, also of the Underground; P/O. BRENTFORD, an Air Bomber of a Stirling crew … also ADRIAN, a member of the Underground, and two Dutchmen in hiding. BRUMMAGER also stayed here but JOOP left us. EMMY was our contact with the "outside world", and was also responsible for providing the food and any personal needs we might have.

— MI9 · Pte J. Hardy, 16 Parachute Field Ambulance · IS9/WEA/1/270/2351 · 13 January 1945 · the report

Hardy left on 19 October to try for the lines, came back on the evening of 26 October from a house at Elspeet with Murphy and "the other Paratrooper", and found "The same party was still occupying the house"; Banwell joined them on 29 October, and the men were taken away at midnight on 6 November (Hardy). Hardy does not name Walsh or Sterrehoveke; Noordman has them, as the house of Ima van Eysinga where Murphy and Walsh were hidden, from Liesbeth Verweij's account of Tom, Jack and Sam (Noordman, pp. 300–303). Murphy was there from 26 October to that night.

◐ Whether Hardy's Emmy is Emma Vroege. Very probably, but no source says so in so many words:

• Hardy gives only "EMMY" and her age; Emma Vroege was nineteen from 17 June 1944 (her identity card).
• Migchelsen names her first of his helpers, for "food, clothing, comfort", and Hardy's Emmy saw to the food (his file, p. 2).
• Lavender has the RAF man "Jimmy Branford" kept by the group "in a little house he called ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’’" (the snippet doubles the marks round the inner title), and in her words "Since Jimmy was my responsibility, and because col- lecting food was becoming more and more difficult, [I] had to quit a job that [I] had at a bank" (the snippets, p. 30). Hardy's "P/O. BRENTFORD" in the house is James Branford. Whether "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was Kijkuit is not said.
  • The two accounts of Branford's arrival differ: Lavender has him shot down "in 1944" and getting "to the Dutch border by himself"; Hardy has him shot down over Berlin about sixteen months before and escaped from a prison camp near Leipzig, which the MBE citation and his page put at August 1943 (the catalogue gives his capture, 27 August 1943) and Stalag IVB. What links the two Jimmys is the name, the RAF and a little house in the woods.
• On p. 255 the raw snippet begins mid-sentence at "airmen like Jimmy Branford and several paratroopers who had survived the attack on Arnhem"; the words before it are not in the raw snippets, and the paratroopers are not named in what the search returns.
• Wolter Noordman spoke to her by telephone in 2001 ("Mrs. E. Taack-Vroege, telefoongesprekken 2001", among his sources from Canada), but his book prints Hardy's account with "Emmy" and does not name her (Noordman, pp. 279 and 335).

◐ Lavender's book, again only from the search snippets, gives her arrest, in the book's own narration:

On January 13, 1945, she was arrested. One of the teen-age boys in the Organi- zation dated a girl who also went out with Germans. Apparently this boy bragged to the girl about his prowess with a revolver, obtained as a member of the Resis- tance. The girl relayed this information to her German boyfriend. The boy was arrested and he informed on the rest of the group. Emmy and her friend Mimy were taken to a military camp.

— Emerson Lavender, The Evaders (1992), p. 255, from the Internet Archive's search snippets, not read on the page · the snippets

The boy and the girl are not named. In the next lines, in her own words, the two women were carrying papers and some butter to deliver, and tried to get rid of the papers: "We hadn’t been frisked yet, so our immediate goal was to get rid of the papers we were carrying", tearing up a manila envelope because burning it would have smelt (pp. 255–256; the raw snippets). What happened to her after that is not in what the search returns. The paper in the name Wilhelmina Stevens, dated ◐ March 1945 (under After), is later than the arrest; no source says how or when she was freed.

◐ A Dutch book on Nunspeet, Hulshorst and the Vierhouten camp (6th revised edition, 2004), also read only through the search snippets, has a woman called Minie arrested and, "Samen met koerierster Emmy Vroe- ge en Bram Baar, werd ze vastgehouden in een kazerne te Ermelo" (together with the courier Emmy Vroege and Bram Baar, she was held in a barracks at Ermelo), where "Bram Baar zou daar vreselijk mishandeld zijn" (Bram Baar is said to have been terribly mistreated there) (the snippets). ◐ Lavender's "Mimy" and this book's "Minie" may be the same woman; that is our reading of two similar names, and neither book gives a surname.

✓ Bram Baar was arrested at Hulshorst on 13 January 1945, the date Lavender gives for her, and was shot at Varsseveld on 2 March 1945 (the war dead register; his file, p. 2; Bram Baar). The other accounts of how the group was taken are on his page: Migchelsen's form has Baar "arrested because of weapon smuggling and shot as reprisal measure" (Migchelsen's file, p. 4).

◐ The false paper in the name "Wilhelmina Stevens" is hers by the file name of its image on her oral-history page (the page has no printed captions), which calls it "Emmas false identity card"; the paper itself does not name her. Below the declaration it has "Sie sollte aus Arnheim evakuieren" (she was to evacuate from Arnhem) (her oral-history page; read on the image, which is small).

✓ Her oral-history page shows a pass, "Toegangsbewijs Centr. Intern. Kamp - Harderwijk", issued by the P.O.D., valid from 0.00 to 24.00 hours, in a name beginning "Vroe…", with the identity-card number "E 27/015938", the number on her card of 4 June 1945 (her oral-history page, read on the images). ◐ If the number was issued with the card, the pass dates from 4 June 1945 or later; it does not say what she did at the camp.

◐ In March 1946 Bram Baar's claim to the Americans, filled in for him after his death and signed A. Baar on 2 March 1946, gave as its two witnesses Joop Migchelsen and "Emmy Vroege, Boreelstraat 2b, Rotterdam" (Baar's file, p. 5, read on the image). The form gives only the name, an address and the city, so that this is Emma is our reading, from the same name and city.

Her married name was van Taack Trakranen; no record of the marriage has been found. ✓ The 1985 register of bearers of the Verzetsherdenkingskruis has her as "Taack Trakranen - Vroege, Emma W. van 17-06-1925" (the register, p. 218), and her oral-history page shows the certificate, made out to "EMMA WILHELMINA v TAACK TRAKRANEN - VROEGE" and dated at The Hague in January ◐ 1984 (the day and the last figure are hard to read at this size) (her oral-history page).

She lived in Canada. Lavender's book, published in 1992, calls her "now of Toronto" (the snippets), and Noordman lists his telephone calls with her in 2001 among his sources from Canada (Noordman, p. 335). ◐ The Globe and Mail of Toronto named "Emmy Van Taack" on 12 November 1984 ("Emmy Van Taack, who fought in", the rest not returned) and on 2 September 2010 ("Member Emmy Van Taack was part of the Dutch resis- tance from the", just after the words "members who share memories of the war."); only these search snippets are held, as both issues are borrow-only (the snippets).

In February 2009 she visited Crestwood School in Toronto and was interviewed by two of its students for its oral-history project. Her page there holds fifteen video clips (among them "Joining the Resistance", "Halifax Pilot" and "People saved during the war") and thirteen photographs and papers; the clips have not been watched (her oral-history page). No date of death has been found.

• When the men left Kijkuit. Hardy has the party taken away at midnight on 6 November; Migchelsen's typed answers have the six men "Delivered 'en bloc' on 11th Nov. 1944 (midnight 1 o'clock)" (his file, p. 3), ⚠︎ five days later than Hardy's report of January 1945, which has them at Harskamp on the evening of 7 November. Joop Migchelsen and Kijkuit to Harskamp carry both.
• How the group was taken in January 1945. Lavender's account has a boy of the group boast of his revolver to a girl who told her German boyfriend, and the boy, once arrested, inform on the rest (the snippets, p. 255). Migchelsen's form has Baar arrested "because of weapon smuggling" (his file, p. 4); the biography on Baar's page has him walk into a trap set by the Sicherheitsdienst (Bram Baar). None of them names anyone, and none is a record of the arrests.
• Where she lived. Hulshorst, Oudeweg 118, on Migchelsen's list of August 1945 (his file, p. 2), and Boreelstraat 2b, Rotterdam, on Baar's claim of March 1946 (Baar's file, p. 5), if that Emmy Vroege is her (◐): seven months apart, so not a contradiction.

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