Never heard of him. Her. Freddie is – or rather was, a her. Freddie short for? I can’t find that it was short for anything but one assumes Frederica – a not uncommon name in Northern Europe in the 1920s, when Freddie was born. She grew up in poverty and, when still a child, seduced Nazi soldiers in occupied Holland, luring them to the woods where she killed them. My point being that as much as I think I would do such a thing – holy fuck – Freddie actually did it.
Her family hid a Jewish couple in their home, and Freddie became a resistance fighter in the Netherlands in her teens, handing out anti-Nazi pamphlets, using dynamite to disable bridges and railroad tracks and yes, seducing soldiers to their deaths as well as, in one noteworthy incident, shooting one from her moving bike. Again – something I like to imagine myself doing and – probably not. In addition to the above, Freddie and her sister helped Jewish children escape Dutch concentration camps, and, ultimately, the country.
Here’s the thing: why no film or TV show about Freddie, FFS? I’m pretty sick TBH, of films about the Nazis and their hateful, heinous behavior, which in my opinion distract somewhat from the heinousness of current people/s and events, events we don’t want to look at and consider because then we’d have to take some responsibility for not getting on the bike or doing something, anything (calling a Senator or Congressperson, for example) to help change the present day shitshow of heinousness. Costume dramas, reality TV, professional sports: a lovely way to distract ourselves while shit happens elsewhere, bad, terrible shit we participate in passively from our comfy homes – but wait I lost my thread!
A show about a teenaged girl and her equally adolescent sister, Freddie and Truus! Now that I could get behind, while waiting for my congressman (a one-termer, fingers x’ed) via one of his representatives, to pick up. Again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_Oversteegen
