Willem Johan Cornelis Arondeus
(August 22, 1894 - July 1, 1943) Holland
Writer, painter, and resistance fighter
Willem, born in Amsterdam, run awy from home at age 18 and sought the friendship of several artists, while visiting an art school for painters. For about ten years he struggled to survice with almost no recognition. His first oaid work was at the age 28: he did a huge wall painting in the city hall of Rotterdam.
Nonetheless he stopped painting in 1928 and started writing, but his first poems and short novels did not sell well. Through all these years he kept writing a diary, in which he opensly expressed his unsatisfied longing for griendship and love towards other men.
In 1933 - at the age of 38 - he met Jan, a young delivery boy from a grocery shop in the countryside close to Apeldoorn, where he lived at the time. Jan soon moved in with Willem and although both were very poor, they enjoyed a deep loev and gave each other much support.
Unfortunately their financial problems grew, and often they did not have enough to eat or to pay their rent. Arondeus felt deeply ashamed that he - the older one - could not care better for his young lover.
Finally in 1938 he started writing the biography of the Dutch painter Matthijs Maris and the sales of this book assured him for the first time a certain income.
After the German occupation of Hollad Arondeus became a member of the resistance. No much later he split up with Jan, who returned to Apeldoorn, while Arondeus remained in Amsterdam, , falsifying registration papers and thus making it difficult for the Nazis to identify Jews for deportation to concentration camps.
On March 27th, 1943, in an effort to protect the identity of those in hiding, Arondeus led an attack on the citizen registration building of Amsterdam, where copies of all identity cards of each citizen were held. He was arrested in April 1943 after having blown up the bevolkingsregister (Amsterdam General Registry Office), and executed by a firing-squad, on July 1, 1943.
Arondeus asked his lawyer to make public after the war that he and two of the men executed with him were gay: "Tell the people that gays are no cowards!". But only in 1990 did it become known that Arondeus was gay. He was awarded a posthumous medal of honor from the Dutch government in 1945 for his efforts in the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation of Holland.
Documentary about his life: Na het feest zonder afscheid verdwenen
Source: Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History, from Antiquity to WWII, Routledge, London, 2001 - and other sources
Photo source: http://www.users.wineasy.se/hattom/Arondeus.html
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