Gertrude van Tijn Collection

On July 4, 1891 Gertrude Francisca Cohn was born in Braunschweig, Germany. She studied social work under Alice Salomon at the Lotte-Verein in Berlin. In 1910 she went to England, where she had relatives. Made to leave due to her nationality, in 1915 she went to the neutral country of Holland, where she worked for a time for the banker C.E. ter Meulen. and became involved in the Zionist movement, attending meetings with Chaim Weizmann, Norman Bentwich and others.

In 1919 Gertrude Cohn married the engineer and geologist Jan van Tijn. They lived a year in Switzerland, and in 1921 had a daughter. The family lived in South Africa, Holland, and Mexico, where their son was born. From 1925 until 1932 they lived in South Africa with explorations to various countries nearby. On their return to Holland in late 1932, where her husband had accepted a position as engineer, Gertrude van Tijn visited Palestine for the first time.

In April 1933 she began to assist with the growing number of Jewish refugees from Germany. This assistance led to Gertrude van Tijn becoming the representative of the Joint Distribution Committee in Holland and a member of an advisory committee of the League of Nations' Commission for Refugees. She became head of the Emigration Department of the Dutch Refugee Committee and also the secretary of the Werkdorp Nieuwesluis, a farm founded in 1934 in the Wieringermeer polder in North Holland that trained refugees of varying ages and vocations in agricultural work as well as construction, the raising of cattle and poultry, domestic work, gardening, cabinetry, locksmithing, and other practical work. She also aided in organizing the trip of the Dora, a ship which in 1939 brought a number of refugees from Amsterdam to Palestine.

Although she sent her children abroad, Gertrude van Tijn remained in Holland and chose not to go into hiding because of her work assisting refugees. In September 1943 she was sent to the concentration camp Westerbork and then Bergen-Belsen. In July 1944 she was among those Jews exchanged from Bergen-Belsen for Germans in Palestine. Afterwards the Dutch government in exile offered her a position in London to work with displaced Jews; she traveled through liberated Europe and Switzerland in this capacity until the end of the war.

After reuniting with her children in New York the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration offered her a position working with refugees in China. She stayed in this role for a year then spent three months working with the Joint Distribution Committee in Australia before going to the United States. After traveling through the country she lived for a decade in Taos, New Mexico, then settled in 1958 in Portland, Oregon, to be closer to family. Gertrude van Tijn died in Portland in 1974.