Maybe the most amazing thing about the interview with Rita Meier is that it almost didn’t happen. When filming a couple of interviews in Israel for the documentary, it was Mirjam Bait Talmi Szpiro who, innocently, asked after we had just finished filming with her: “So, are you also going to interview my friend Rita as well?” It was the morning of our last day in Israel, with a flight back to Holland scheduled later that night. But we got Rita’s phone number, made the call and found out that she was free in the afternoon and willing to talk about Truus Wijsmuller and her memories of war!
It became one of the most special meetings, thanks to Rita’s openness and her ability to describe so many feelings in such detail.
One of the saddest but also most inspiring things she shared was her shock at how quickly things turned nasty in her hometown of Friedrichstadt, an apparently sweet little laid-back city in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. But once Hitler came into power, everything changed. And that is when she realized that during Kristallnacht it was this person from her school that all of a sudden was standing in the middle of their house, tearing cupboards and closets down, humiliating Rita and her entire family. She explained to us how she decided there and then to turn around, facing this man with her back instead of her face. This, she told us, was her form of silent protest: she didn’t want to give this man the pleasure of seeing her cry.

Being so young and having the courage to already come up with this personal form of protest touched us deeply.

And then there was this one other quote during the interview, while reflecting on the role of Truus Wijsmuller in her life: “Sometimes in life, you don’t know where your luck comes from”… It is so poignant, that we often think about these true words when things get tough.

This is what it must have felt like for Rita when Truus Wijsmuller, in all haste and after an almost impossible journey from Paris back to Amsterdam, arrived at the Burgerweeshuis (orphanage) just in time to save the 74 children, including Rita, she knew depended on her to escape the Nazis. To this day, Rita doesn't know how she managed to do that. But it worked, and that's all that matters.