Nearly every time I write a post about a ”forgotten hero,” I get comments like, ”I didn’t forget about her!” or ”How dare you imply she has been forgotten.” These people, unfortunately, miss the point of the post. For some reason, they feel it was a personal attack on them. The heroes I write about are, in the greater scheme of things, often forgotten. They may be known or remembered by a few—but for a wider audience—they are unknown historical figures, as undoubtedly is the case for Henriëtte (Hetty) Laman Trip-de Beaufort.
I came across her name in Julia Boyd and Angelika Patel’s book A Village in the Third Reich—How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism.
Hetty was a Dutch lady living in Oberstdorf, Bavaria. In 1924, she received a substantial inheritance from her Aunt Henriëtte van Eck, who had no children. Because Hetty and her husband, Herman Laman Trip, also had no children, they decided to use the inheritance to set up a children’s sanitorium—Hohes Licht, in Oberstdorf because of the fresh and clean Alpine air. Her husband died in 1928.
She worked amicably with the German director, Elisabeth Sophie Dabelstein. Both women had nothing to do with the Nazis and—although this was illegal and could have dire consequences, they took Jewish children into their sanatorium. They registered them as Aryan. The sanatorium then acted as a link in a smuggling route along which Jewish children were taken to Switzerland. Hetty also smuggled food, clothing and other necessities to Dutch prisoners and forced labourers at the camps—in the vicinity of the village. In the Netherlands, Hetty was decorated for her good deeds after the war as an officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau, Elisabeth as a knight.
She was also an author. Her first novel, Willem van Oranje (William of Orange), appeared in 1916. Her work was part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics.
Sources
https://www.tracesofwar.nl/books/5922/A-Village-in-the-Third-Reich.htm
https://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/vrouwenlexicon/lemmata/data/Beaufort
https://www.olympedia.org/athletes/921766
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History of Sorts 
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