This book tells the story of Johanna (Hannie) Schaft, the famous girl with the red hair, a Dutch resistance fighter during WW2.
The book starts at the beginning of the war, when Hannie is studying law in Amsterdam and she lives with two Jewish friends. Hannie steals the persoonsbewijs (personal ID) of two random women to give to her friends so they don’t have to wear the horrible yellow stars on their clothes. She tries to convince her friends’ families to leave the Netherlands, or to hide but their families refuse. When she hears more about Jews being deported to concentration camps, she takes her two friends to her parents’ home where the two girls get to hide in Hannie’s childhood bedroom. One of them leaves for Switzerland soon after as she is going stir crazy in the little room.
Hannie is recruited by the resistance and soon she starts going on missions to kill high placed German officers, or people who are in the NSB (Dutch collaborators). She falls in love with Jan, the guy she goes on missions with, however, he is married – but also in love with Hannie. Then a mission goes wrong and Jan is shot and in his delirium he gives up Hannie’s name and her address. Hannie’s gets home just in time to see her parents being taken away but she doesn’t see her friend.
Now that the Germans know the name of the infamous girl with the red hair, she dies her hair black and is taken off the more public missions. When the Germans pick her up in Amsterdam, they don’t know who they’ve found until one of them notices the roots of her hair. Hannie was questioned for days, but she never gave up any of the other resistance fighters. She was executed on the 17th of April 1945, only 2 weeks before the Netherlands were liberated.
I already knew the story of Hannie Schaft – I’ve read Theun de Vries’ Het meisje met het rode haar (the girl with the red hair) from 1956 several times – and have seen the Dutch film based on that book several times as well.
This was an excellent retelling of her story, one of the heroines of my country.
Read for The 52 Book Club Reading Challenge 2025
Prompt 2: A Character with Red Hair
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
