Loulou Oderkerk was a Dutch resistance fighter who worked for the illegal newspaper Trouw. Through Trouw founder Gesina van der Molen, Oderkerk became involved in smuggling Jewish children to hiding places. Oderkerk also started doing courier work for Trouw, transporting copies, essays, newspapers and weapons. In October 1944, she was arrested and held prisoner in the Euterpestraat and the Weteringschans in Amsterdam. Personal letters show that she was abused there. In January 1945, she escaped from prison, after which she continued her resistance work. After the war, Oderkerk married Trouw man Kees Streef.
She was born on February 2, 1922, as Maria Johanna Oderkerk. Perhaps her birthdate of 2/2/22 meant she was destined for greater things. She used Loulou as her resistance name.
In 1943, Oderkerk studied at the Hervormde Kweekschool on the Plantage Middenlaan in Amsterdam. From her classroom, she looked out at the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a gathering place from which Jews were deported via Camp Westerbork and Camp Vught to the extermination camps like Sobibor and Auschwitz,
Children up to the age of thirteen had to await deportation in the nursery next to the nursery school. Because the shelter was filled to capacity, the babies were allowed to take their afternoon nap in the nursery. During her exam, she met resistance fighter Gezina van der Molen, who decided on the spot to save as many babies as possible. She became her assistant and one of the five ‘child workers’ of the Trouw Group, who smuggled out a total of about eighty Jewish children and housed them in their own circle. This later became known as the child smuggling Hollandsche Schouwburg.
In 1944, she was arrested by the German Security Service and imprisoned. “She was seriously abused, and her back was smashed,” according to journalist Rianne Oosterom. She quotes a passage from one of Loulou’s letters that has been found. ”They had first interrogated me at home, but in Euterpestraat, things went crazy. Twice for a few hours and not exactly gentle.”
Loulou was later put to work behind the meat machine in the kitchen of Huize Lydia in Amsterdam, where German soldiers had their quarter. Together with four other girls, they were transported from the cell every morning between 8:30 and 9:30 am (as Loulou herself wrote in one of her letters) to Huize Lydia and back again at 9:00 pm in the evening. “You work half to death there: potatoes and dishes from 150 men, including 120 SD members, carrying coal from the cellar.”
She managed to escape from there on January 7, 1945, through a door in the basement. She went into hiding and started coordinating work for the Trouw Group. At the end of the war, she worked in the administrative department of Trouw in Utrecht.
A few months after the war, Oderkerk heard that her fiancé Willem Ottervanger, who had been arrested in May 1944, had died in Neuengamme Concentration Camp. She left for France to work as an au pair and relax. In 1947, she married Kees Streef, whom she had met at the Wedding Office in Utrecht. He had been imprisoned like them and had escaped. They married in 1947. They had three children.
Until her death, she continued to use her pseudonym ‘Loulou’ as her first name. She died at the age of 74 from colon cancer on November 28, 1996.
Sources
https://www.at5.nl/artikelen/226170/loulou-oderkerk-verzetsvrouw-voor-de-illegale-trouw
https://www.oorlogsbronnen.nl/tijdlijn/3f223ddc-cb56-4f2e-b76a-283bc07a030f
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