Nonfiction generally doesn’t keep the reader on the edge of the seat, but Three Ordinary Girls by Tim Brady often does just that. Beginning with the Third Reich troops swarming into the Netherlands in May 1940, the progress of World War II sets the stage for three unlikely heroes in three teenaged girls.
Truus and Freddie Oversteegeen came from a family that had a tradition of being active in leftist circles in Haarlem so their resistance to the German takeover seems natural. Jannetje Johanna Schaft, who would become known as Hannie, grew up in a more conventional way as a shy schoolgirl in stylish clothes with wavy red hair, in a row house near a windmill. She was an only child doted on by her parents. While the Schafts, too, had strong political views, Hannie lived a sheltered life. The transition for the three young women as they begin with relatively simple things like forging ID cards, hiding their Jewish friends, and distributing the underground press papers and move on to becoming spies, saboteurs, and assassins becomes a gripping account.
When a reader thinks of the Netherlands during World War II, Anne Frank and Corrie ten Boom come to mind. They are included in the text as markers in the timeline of this narrative, but the story is of these three young women and the people they save, often in a more aggressive manner than that of Frank and ten Boom. Brady gives statistics that show the difficulty that all of them shared. No occupied country in Europe lost a higher rate of its Jewish population to the Holocaust than the Netherlands with only 5,000 Jews left in Amsterdam of the 80,000 who had been there before the war.
My conclusion is the that the title is a misnomer. These girls may have begun as ordinary, but what they did put them into an entirely different category. The book gives a perspective on just how difficult life was in the Netherlands and how excruciating it became even as the radio gave hope that the end was near. I found the book to be a compelling read, but would not recommend it for bedtime reading!