Mathilde Verspyck

The Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor, was conferred both for her resistance activities and for the imprisonment and death she suffered in relation to that work. According to the General Orders issued on 1 November 1946 and 20 March 1947 by the United States Department of Defense as part of this award:

Arrested and jailed twice between 1941 and 1943 for her involvement with resistance work, she was arrested a third time in mid-April 1944 for sheltering and facilitating the escape of political prisoners and Allied pilots, as well as espionage. Jailed at the prison at Scheveningen, she was transported to Herzogenbusch (Vught) in the Netherlands two months later. Transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany three months later, she died there on 11 February 1945.

After surviving two months of imprisonment at Herzogenbusch (Vught) from April to June 1944, a concentration camp which was run by the Nazi Schutzstaffel (also known as the "SS"), Mathilde Verspyck was then transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. Initially able to withstand the increasingly harsh treatment she received there, she was finally so exhausted that she died at Ravensbrück on 11 February 1945. Note: Although British intelligence agent Airey Neave stated in his 1954 book that Verspyck died on 11 May 1945, many other sources, including the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, have confirmed that Verspyck's date of death was 11 February 1945.

Shortly after the invasion of the Netherlands by Germany and the subsequent surrender of Dutch troops on 14 May 1940, Verspyck began helping European resistance movements try to free political prisoners who had been sentenced to death, and also worked with the Comète escape line (Comet escape line) of the Belgian Resistance, sheltering allied pilots who had been shot down before also helping them to escape. The duties of Comet line members varied, but typically involved providing airmen and soldiers who had been trapped behind enemy lines with food, clothing and false identity papers, hiding them in attics or cellars, and/or guiding them through occupied France to neutral Spain, from where they were able to safely make their way to Great Britain and return to military service.

In addition, Philippe Connart, Michel Dricot, Edouard Renière, and Victor Schutters, creators of the resistance research website, Le Réseau Comète (The Comet Network), have indicated that Mathilde A. E. Verspyck's mother, Mathilde Adrienne (Prins) Verspyck, may also have been involved in European resistance activities during World War II (or that the names of mother and daughter were periodically confused by historians and genealogical researchers over the years). Per their website's biographical sketch of Johan Jacob Greter, a 1936 Olympic silver medalist and member of the Netherlands military whose escape was facilitated by the Comet line [rough translation]:

Mathilde Adrienne Eugénie Verspyck (16 July 1908 – 11 February 1945) "was a brave woman who was a devoted believer in the cause of freedom, for which she later sacrificed her life," according to her U.S. Medal of Freedom award.

Born in Semarang, Java on 16 June 1908, Mathilde Verspyck (Dutch spelling "Verspijck") was a granddaughter of Rudolph Paul Verspyck (1837-1929), a prominent Dutch general, and the daughter of Rudolph Hubert Marie Verspyck (1869-1949), and his second wife, Mathilde Adrienne Prins. Her father, a native of Bergen op Zoom in the southern part of the Netherlands, was a partner in the leading brokerage firm of Dunlop & Kolff, which operated in the Dutch East Indies areas of Batavia, Semarang and Surabaya, trading in fish, sugar, tea and other high-demand goods. After her parents divorced sometime around 1920, her father then remarried in London, United Kingdom in 1921.