Meet Willem Arondeus, the Dutch artist & author who started an underground resistance movement against the Nazis in WWII. He was executed in 1943 for bombing a public records office to protect Jews from Nazi persecution. Being openly gay his entire life, his final words were:
Arondeus was forced to leave home at the age of 17 as his parents could not accept his choice to live openly gay.
When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, Arondeus and his friend, lesbian cellist Frieda Belinfante, were among the first to join the Dutch anti-Nazi resistance movement.
Arondeus used his artistic skills to forge documents and create false identity papers for Dutch Jews, but the Nazis were still able to check the documents against public records.
In 1943, Arondeus and his comrades bombed the Public Records Office in Amsterdam and succeeded in destroying thousands of records of Jews and others whose movements were being tracked by the Nazis.
Weeks later, Arondeus was sentenced to death. Before his execution, he told his lawyer to "Tell the people that homosexuals are not by definition weak!"

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More from @redfishstream

16 Jun
On this day in history the Soweto Uprising took place, when more than 20,000 South African Black school children took to the streets of Soweto to protest. When police opened fire and killed hundreds, rioting escalated into a nationwide uprising against white apartheid rule.
The 1976 Uprising that began in Soweto was triggered by the introduction of Afrikaans as a language of instruction in schools, because it was seen by most Black South Africans as directly linked to apartheid and the violent, white state.
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15 Jun
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15 Jun
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13 Jun
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4 Jun
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3 Jun
People across Canada are mourning the “cultural genocide” that Indigenous children were subjected to in the former residential school system, after the remains of 215 children, some as young as three years old, were found on the site of the largest of such schools.
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