...Regulations which forced Jews to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing as a means of identification were announced in the Netherlands on the 29th of April 1942. Those caught without the badge after the 5th of May, when they came into effect, were arrested, and detained for a six-week period to serve at Mauthausen. In the Netherlands everyone knew that this was a death sentence.

Deportations of Jews from the Netherlands began in July 1942. The last train left Westerbork for Auschwitz on the 3rd of September 1944. During these two years, the Germans and their Dutch collaborators deported some 107,000 Jews, mostly to Auschwitz and Sobibor, where they were murdered. Only 5,200 survived.
Because some Dutch citizens couldn’t bear to see what was happening to their country and people and resisted the occupation, they joined the resistance. The resistance’s counterintelligence, domestic sabotage and communications networks helped to provide key support to the Allied forces throughout the liberation of Holland.
Members of the resistance, if discovered, were immediately sentenced to death.

Van Dijk initially helped the resistance by supplying her fellow Jews with hiding places, identity papers, and necessities. Between 25,000-30,000 Jews went into hiding in the Netherlands and Ans Van Dijk was one of them. Hiding in the Amsterdam’s Marco Polostraat, she had accommodated two Jewish ladies at another address in the same street. However,
those ladies were betrayed and in turn told that the hiding place had been handed to them by Van Dijk who was arrested on Easter Sunday 1943 by Pieter Schaap – a detective of the Office of Jewish Affairs of the Amsterdam police. At the office, Ans was given a choice: either go to the East or work together with the Nazis. She decided to team up with the SD – the German Security Police, and from that moment on her life took a dramatic turn.


Prenteding to be a member of the illegal resistance organization “Free Nederlands”, she offered to help Jews find hiding places and obtain false papers. Van Dijk convinced dozens of Jews that she sought to help them. Instead, she betrayed their hiding places to Schaap, who in turn had the Jews arrested. Her house at Jekerstraat street in Amsterdam served as a trap.

The previously rather shy woman with little self-confidence blossomed through her work for the bureau. In addition, she received praise and recognition for every person who got caught by the Germans with her help.
Within a couple of months of making her arrangement with Schaap, van Dijk found herself at the head of a group of women hunting Jews. Among these women were Rosalie Roozendaal...