De Ranitzstraat 3a

Anda Kerkhoven was born into a wealthy family. She was a daughter of ir. Adriaan Rudolph Willem Kerkhoven and Constanze Pauline Marie Bosscha. She descended from the father's and the mother's side from the banker Johannes Kerkhoven and his second wife Anna Jacoba van der Hucht.

She grew up in the former Dutch East Indies, where her father owned the tea and rubber company Panoembangan in West Java. She went to study medicine in Batavia, but in principle refused to do animal experiments. That is why she left for the Netherlands in 1938 to study at the University of Groningen, where this was not compulsory. She joined the student association Magna Pete and wrote about her pacifist beliefs in the student magazine Der Clercke Cronike at the age of 19. Not all of her contributions were received positively.

After the start of World War II, she continued to advocate nonviolent resistance. She joined Gerrit Boekhoven's resistance group Groep-De Groot, who had recruited more pacifist students. Their resistance activities included making counterfeits, maintaining contacts between resistance fighters and distributing coupons, not by violent robberies, but by making contacts. The group played a central role in the distribution of the ration cards in the north and Anda Kerkhoven was an important courier. On December 27, 1944, Anda was arrested by the Sicherheitsdienst. She was subjected to severe torture in the Scholtenhuis in Groningen by, among others, the SD man Robert Lehnhoff. However, she remained silent. After Gerrit Boekhoven and Dinie Aikema were also arrested in January 1945, almost the entire Groep-De Groot was rolled up.

On March 19, 1945, at the insistence of Zacharias Sleijf, she was shot and killed by members of the Dutch Sicherheitsdienst, led by Meindert Vonk and Harry Bouman. At the place where this happened, on the edge of the forest on the Oosterbroekweg on the border of Glimmen and Haren, 20 to 30 Dutch people were executed. A few days later Dinie Aikema was murdered in the same place, and Gerrit Boekhoven had suffered that fate on the same day as Anda Kerkhoven, but a few kilometers away on the Vosbergen (Eelde) estate.

Anda Kerkhoven was buried at the place of execution. On June 22, 1945, her remains were ordered to earth again at the Northern Cemetery in Groningen, where a funeral monument of Bas Galis was placed. In 1967 she was reburied at the Loenen Cemetery of Honor. A memorial stone was unveiled in 2003 where she was shot.

Kerkhoven is depicted together with Aletta Jacobs on the memorial windows made by the Plow painter Johan Dijkstra in the Academy Building of the University of Groningen. In 2008, a planetoid discovered in 1990 was named after her.

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