Two Fridays ago I read the news of your death. It was early in the day and I was sitting on my patio sipping coffee as a strong breeze disturbed the morning paper spread out before me, the broadsheet pages flapping as if intent on telling me something. I turned to the obituaries, and there was yours below the fold. I tend to merely skim the obits, which feels rather irreverent, like speeding past a hearse in the street with barely a glance, but yours took hold of me and I read it avidly. There were two photos of you, striking ones although they were black-and-white and so didn’t portray the vivid red of your hair—a feature, I learned, that was central to your story. I’m a redhead, too, or I used to be until the decades added up and the bright color began to fade and gray started creeping in. Is that why I am writing to you, Hannie Schaft—to acknowledge that I have lived long enough to lose the copper sheen in my hair, while you died long before your brilliant hues could be touched by age? One may regret the loss of lustrous hair as it grays or thins, but really these are signs that one has avoided a too-early demise, which you did not.

If we read a report of a death in today’s newspaper, that means it’s news, right? But you died 78 years ago. Your death was news to me – you were news to me – but your obituary was written to right an old wrong; it was an entry in a series about the “overlooked”, those significant people whose deaths went unreported at the time, largely due to cultural biases. The article I read about you was an oxymoron—it was old news.

You were 24 years old when you died, in 1945, at the hands of the Nazis. That was a very long time ago—so long that your generation is barely visible from today’s vantage point, as if your era and ours were stranded on opposite sides of a wide unbridgeable gorge. Yet just the other day I read of a person who had somehow made the crossing from your distant cliff to ours. On that recent morning when I read your very belated obituary, in the year 2023, a contemporary of yours was still living. She was a Dutch woman like you, and just your age – actually she was six months older – and like you she had been a target of the Nazis. She had managed to escape while you did not. Marga Minco also walked the streets of Amsterdam during the war; perhaps you passed each other in disguise, you with your red hair dyed black, she with her dark hair bleached blond. After the war she became a writer and wrote a famous book about the Holocaust, and she lived 78 years longer than you. Your obituary appeared on the first Friday in July and Marga Minco died three days later at the age of 103. Strange: you died almost eight decades apart and the notices appeared in the New York Times within ten days of each other.

When the Nazis invaded Holland in May 1940, it would have been highly unlikely that Marga Minco would outlive you by even a single day. She was Jewish and you were not. She belonged to a people chosen for destruction – she alone in her immediate family escaped the death camps – while you were of “respectable” stock, and had only to tolerate your homeland being under occupation. Lots of Dutch did that. Marga Minco wore a yellow star on her sleeve, while the sleeves of your black dress, visible in the newspaper photo of you on a city street in winter, draw attention only to their fashion—the padded shoulders, the tailored look. In your country under Nazi control, you still had freedom to move about unhunted.

You rejected that stunted freedom, Hannie Schaft. You chose to become hunted. You chose – it seems incredible to write these words – to become a hunter yourself, to hunt Nazis and their collaborators, and to kill them. That was why you had to dye your hair black: because the Nazis wanted to find the girl with red hair who was killing them. Your obituary says you took part in shooting six German occupiers and Dutch traitors. You thought it likely that you would die as a result of these attacks on the enemy.

Why am I addressing this letter to you when it cannot reach you? Throughout my adult life my way of responding to feelings inside me has been to put words on paper. Sometimes I’ve tried to make art out of those words, sometimes write letters. You are familiar to me—it isn’t just that we shared hair color. In your obituary you are described as a bookworm and rather shy, a university student goaded by your conscience. I was those things in my early twenties. When the Nazis demanded that you sign a pledge of loyalty to them to remain a student, you refused and dropped out. I know I would have wanted to find the courage to do the same. You seem to have been inwardly-oriented while pulled by circumstances toward action. I recognize your tribe for I belong to it as well.

When I was 24, though, I had no thoughts of being willing to die for a cause. I wasn’t tested by such crises as you were—or I didn’t put myself in their way. A long life lay before me. I was in love and we were going to be married, and already dreaming of children. I wanted to be a writer, and my creative present was a fertile field that would lead to future harvests of poems and plays, stories and novels. At 24 I thought a lot about how to live truly and fully, and it didn’t occur to me that among my choices might be renouncing my life. I had the luxury of imagining a future and even planning for one.

A fierce resolve is not the most natural quality of a rather shy bookworm. But you resolved to leave university although you had wanted to be a human-rights lawyer. You resolved to join the Resistance. You resolved to kill Nazis. You could have had a perfectly honorable war, volunteering for the Red Cross (which you did), refusing to pledge your support to the Third Reich (you did refuse), and even helping Jews to avoid deportation to Auschwitz—a very risky undertaking but surely less of a suicide mission than shooting Nazis and their quislings. (You did help to hide Jews and to get them fake IDs.) You could have done all those things – you did do them – and when the war was over and for the rest of your life looked back with pride at your valiant contributions to defeating the enemy. That wasn’t enough for you. You resolved to make the killing of Nazis more important than your own survival.

Many people showed righteous resolve during the war. All those millions of soldiers, your fellow-citizens who hid Jews, your fellow Resistance fighters. Resolve and sacrifice were essential qualities for anyone who was fighting the Nazis, right? But there is no need to see how well you stack up with other brave souls in your generation, Hannie Schaft. I look across eight decades and an ocean and I see you, an individual, a young vulnerable woman steeling herself to pursue brutal killers. You stir in me feelings of familiarity mingled with awe and reverence. The example you set raises difficult questions for me about how one should live—about how I have lived. Am I worthy of those like you who bore the gravest responsibilities that life can ask? Does the voice inside me demand that I stoke the fires of life (that’s what I want!) or to extinguish them for a purpose indifferent to one’s personal survival (that’s what your conscience led you to do)? Is it really enough just to strive to do good? You might have had a long life filled with the doing of good actions, and you rejected it.

Here is the most difficult question I ask myself: in light of a sacrifice like yours, does a poem I write, or perhaps a novel, really matter at all? I do not mean that if we want to make our lives worthwhile we must put down our pens and paintbrushes and die for a cause. I ask myself if art is less important than acts of sacrifice like yours, a question I should contemplate the next time I am writing a poem.

As I compose this letter to you, Hannie Schaft, I keep thinking of a writer I discovered a few years ago, a very good one, who lived during the war as you did. The two of you would not have met for he spent his war years largely in comfort in Paris. Here is what I scribbled in my journal after reading some of his diary entries: “Ernst Junger is a remarkable writer and thinker. In some of his best passages he brings to my mind Pascal; he is insightful and clever in describing the human condition.”

Ernst Junger was a German officer. He wore the uniform of the Third Reich. He served on the side of the Nazis you killed. He knew about the Holocaust as early as 1942. It is not to praise him that I say he deplored what he found out, writing of the horrific news from the east, “Such reports extinguish the colors of the day….Its infamy is unremitting.” Junger had a long productive life, publishing dozens of books and winning awards, his literary stature earning him accolades even from heads of state. Good fortune and strong self-preservation instincts kept him alive for more than a century—he lived to be 102 years old. Leave out the Nazi years and one could say he had a distinguished and even honorable life. (During the First World War he had been a brave and highly decorated soldier.) In the uniform of the Third Reich, he calculated his risks, made his choices, and survived the war.

You made your choices, too, Hannie Schaft. Is the art that Ernst Junger produced in his century-plus of living more important than the sacrifice you made of your life? Maybe the question is simplistic. Here is something I feel certain of: the war against tyranny – against evil autocrats and their lackeys and butchers – is won not by the private anguish of an Ernst Junger, but by the moral courage of a Hannie Schaft.

You were human like us. Even in those black-and-white photos I can see how lovely your red hair was–luxuriant, wavy, feminine. In the portrait taken on the street in winter, your dress is quite becoming, a belt cinched around your slender waist, a brooch attached below the neck. A purse is tucked tightly under your arm. You look poised and rather self-conscious, and perhaps you are a little vain. (In the other photo of you in the newspaper, a portrait, I see a trace of defiance in your eyes.) You were proud of your red hair and even put on makeup before you went out to shoot Nazis, a gesture suggesting that you were aware of your attractiveness. Maybe the decision to start killing the enemy had its origins not only in noble principles but also in earthy emotions. The romance you may have had with a fellow Resistance fighter, the excitement of daring underground adventures, a sense of self-importance when otherwise you would have been another faceless Dutch citizen under bleak occupation. Maybe depression sapped some of your will to live; maybe boredom made you take ever greater risks, just to feel more of yourself; maybe you thought about posthumous glory. Many ordinary human feelings might have contributed to your resolve. You were like us, like me, except for this: in my six decades I have never been willing and likely to die for my beliefs, or encountered such a person. You, Hannie Schaft, willed yourself to face death and not back down. Your resolve is the sharp tip of a sword that punctures any inflated sense of myself as a model citizen.

When you were stopped on a street in Haarlem during a random check, the gun in your bicycle bag was suspicious, but you couldn’t have been the woman they were searching for, since you had black hair. Later, when they looked more closely at the roots of your hair, they knew they had found their nemesis. I never understood why they call our hair red. Natural hair is not like the primary color red. Red is never more than an admixture in our hair, which is closer to rust-colored, copper, orange, auburn, tawny, sienna. What is more naturally red than hair? Blood is. Your head was truly red only once, on a sand dune near the Dutch coast when you were shot twice from behind. Your Nazi captors killed you just a few weeks before the end of the war.

After I read your obituary early on that breezy summer morning, I turned to the opinion pieces in the Times—the editorials and op-eds and letters from readers. It was a democratic parliament of fowls on those windswept pages, a cageless, free-range pastureland on which to hatch ideas about politics, race, justice. No one was arrested for saying what was on their mind; no one lost their job. Do you know who made that freedom of expression possible, Hannie Schaft? You did. You and so many others who resolved to fight absolute power even at the cost of your own lives. We owe our freedom to you and to other souls like you throughout history whose sacrifices made possible our freedom and comfort and peace. Your resolve, courage, and moral clarity are precious today—more precious than my words can ever express.

Barth Landor

Barth Landor is the author of a novel, A Week in Winter. He lives in Chicago.

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