Truus van Lier

On the third of September 1943 a twenty-two-year-old law student cycled past here with a pistol on her.

Truus van Lier was waiting for Gerard Kerlen, the chief of police, who drove home around that time. Kerlen was a member of the Dutch national socialist movement and directed the men who rounded up Jews and resistance members in this city. Two shots found their mark.

She did it on the orders of a resistance group from Amsterdam she belonged to. Before that she had already been delivering illegal newspapers, passing messages and moving weapons. Women in the armed resistance were rare, and she acted before Hannie Schaft, who became far better known.

Eleven days later she was betrayed and arrested. On the twenty-seventh of October she was executed at Sachsenhausen, together with two other Dutch women. She was twenty-two.

The statue standing here is recent. Only portrait photographs of her survive, so the artist took a cast of a law student of today, studying at the same university. And since 2004 daffodils have bloomed here every spring in the shape of her name, planted and tended by volunteers.

At the start of this walk stood a woman who began pulling down an emperor's castle because nobody else dared. Four hundred years later this woman did the same with a pistol.

We now walk south along the moat.