Sallandstraat 14
Deventer
She was nineteen years old when Cornelia and her husband started a resistance during the Second World War. What reminds us of her now is the stumbling block on Sallandstraat. This is the story of resistance woman Cornelia.
Cornelia van Baalen-Bosch would be 95 next summer. Corrie, as she was called, was born in Deventer in August 1925. At the age of eighteen she became engaged to student Joost van Baalen. The couple married on March 28, 1945, but it would not be a long and happy marriage.
In addition to their love, they shared a secret together. They were a member of the same resistance group in Deventer. Corrie was the only woman in the resistance group or Knokploeg (KP). The group was entrenched in the Twentol lubricating oil factory at the Master H.F. De Boerlaan, to guard the bridge over the IJssel from there against possible German attempts to destroy it from the German side. This is how the Canadians could liberate the city.
On April 8, 1945, the small crew of knights entrenched themselves in the factory, with a view of the bridge. On the morning of April 10, a German soldier discovered the group. The resistance fighters managed to overpower and disarm him. After he begged them for his life and promised not to betray them, they let him go.
That goodness and humanity became fatal. While the Canadian soldiers were about to cross the bridge to Deventer, the young people in the Twentolfabriek were surrounded and shot at. The building was set on fire and smoked. The city was to be liberated that same evening.
Later reports stated that Corrie was in the Twentolfabriek because she "wanted to be so close to her husband Joost." Yet Corrie was a full member of the group. Long before the Twentoldrama took place, Corrie risked her life as a courier for the Deventer resistance. No one knew she was involved in acts of sabotage and quietly cycled all over town with fake IDs and weapons in her panniers, past German checkpoints. Girls were checked less quickly.
Corrie has always been "different", her niece Geesje Bosch tells later. Geesje says that Corrie was tough and headstrong and didn't care much about what others thought of her. That was certainly remarkable at the time. Corrie grew up in an ordinary working-class family. Her father was a plasterer, her mother a housewife. She had seven sisters and two brothers; the Bosch family lived in the Tibbensteeg. Corrie worked as a laboratory assistant at Noury & Van der lande, a predecessor of the AKSO group.
Geesje knew from a very young age that her aunt Corrie Bosch was a bump. “While it was freezing at least fifteen degrees, she quietly skated on a flooded field nearby. She didn't have long trousers in stockings. ” And she liked to hang out with the students of the Tropical Agricultural School. She had to be home at eight because the curfew went on; it had been war for a while. But Corrie just stayed with her friends.
Nobody, especially her parents, knew that she was the only girl who joined an illegal armed resistance group. Not from an ideology, but simply because it was against injustice, against hatred of Jews and oppression.
Corrie's resistance group is commemorated by means of the Twentol monument on the Snipperlingsdijk. At her parental home on the Sallandstraat is a stumbling stone in memory of Cornelia van Baalen - Bosch. Source: www.struikelstenen-deventer.nl.
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