M.C. van Grunsven, Riet van Grunsven, Riet van de Haterd-van Grunsven, Ice Block and Trouble (Dutch Resistance aliases)
Awards
Bronzen Leeuw (Bronze Lion, Netherlands, 1949)
Maria Catharina van Grunsven (6 September 1918 – 1 March 2004), also known as Riet van Grunsven or Riet van de Haterd-van Grunsven, was an armed member of the
Biesbosch and the Merwede, she operated as a courier for part of the larger Biesbosch resistance group, and the Albrecht intelligence group. During this resistance work, she was given the aliases “Ice Block” and “Trouble.”[1]
In recognition of her valor, she was honored with a personal audience with
Born on 6 September 1918 in Geffen, in what was the Maasdonk province (and in what is now a section of the North Brabant province of the Netherlands), Maria Catharina (“Riet”) van Grunsven was the eldest child of her family. Her father was a contractor who engaged in animal husbandry, raising chickens and the occasional pig while also producing milk and cheese from the family's cow to help support his family. He was also reportedly was a firearms enthusiast who also enjoyed archery.[4]
World War II
Maria Catharina (“Riet”) van Grunsven and her father both joined the
World War II broke out in Europe. Immediately becoming an armed freedom fighter, she initially operated in the Netherlands province of North Brabant, gathering intelligence, delivering medication to Allied and Resistance troops in the north and performing courier duties for her resistance cell while also helping to free captive Dutch citizens from the prison at Mariënhof, the Herzogenbusch concentration camp in Vught, and that concentration camp's subcamp at Sint-Michielsgestel.[5]
Meanwhile, her father assisted the Landelijke Knokploegen (the National Knokploegen or LKP), a resistance organization established by the National Organization for Assistance to Abduction (LO), which falsified identity cards and ration cards as part of the group's efforts to help Dutch citizens evade persecution and capture by Nazi officials. Hiding soldiers, businessmen and political figures in the attic of a secret annex he had built into the van Grunsven home, which was located in one of Geffen's more secluded areas, he then hid more at-risk individuals in a shelter he had constructed outside between two wooded hills. Under increasing scrutiny, he was arrested multiple times.[6]
As Riet van Grunsven continued her resistance work, she accepted increasingly dangerous assignments. During one, she broke two fingers while evading capture, an injury which left those two fingers in a permanently crooked state. In September 1944, she was assigned to rescue a priest and another Dutch citizen who had been arrested and sentenced to death after being falsely accused of blowing up a railroad. Dressed in a nurse's uniform and carrying a 6.35 mm revolver, she infiltrated the prison at Mariënhof by bribing a guard with a bottle of wine laced with sleeping medication. After locating the key to the men's cell, she spirited the pair out of the prison, and sent them to a Taalstraat safehouse.[7]
By the final year of the war, Riet van Grunsven had become a “line crosser,” one of just 21 special resistance operatives from the larger Biesbosch resistance and Albrecht intelligence groups who safeguarded the secret connection between occupied and liberated Netherlands. Operating with her colleagues via the waterways of the Biesbosch and the Merwede, she risked her life numerous times to make this line crossing as a courier, transferring vital information to Allied troops under the aliases of “Ice Block” and “Trouble.” While engaged in one of these missions during the winter of 1944–1945, she was permanently partially paralyzed during a fall in which she damaged a cervical vertebra.[8][9]
Although she frequently traveled alone on her various resistance assignments during the war, she did regularly work for or with several individuals, including: Ad Benne, Carel van de Donck, Daan and Klaas Gielen, Henk Koning, Harrie Roelands, Jan de Swart, and the students known as Duyx and Trimbos.[10]
After her nation was liberated from its German occupiers in May 1945, word of her dangerous exploits spread via newspaper reports, which heralded her valor while also documenting her injury and partial paralysis. Rather than using her birth name, many of those accounts used her resistance name, a practice which would be repeated for much of her post-war life. Her given name was used, however, when she was formally honored by the Dutch government.[11][12][13]