Marijke Driessen

Overview
Marijke Margriet Kuijpers was born on June 26, 1900 at the farmhouse owned by her parents, Adriaan and Dorothea Kuijpers. She was their only child (all the pregnancies following hers were either miscarriages or stillbirths) and as such was raised more as a helpmate than a daughter. By the time she was old enough to help around the house her mother was teaching her how to be a proper housewife and she often accompanied her father out to care for the animals. She attended a local school until she turned thirteen, but dropped out because she didn't figure she needed any more schooling. Despite this, she wanted to see more of the world than the farm near Graft-De Rijp and so when she turned fifteen she wheedled and begged her way into getting her parents to let her stay with a married cousin, Hanneke. Pieter and Hanneke van Vliet owned a small cafe in Amsterdam and it was negotiated that Marijke would be allowed to stay if she worked for them. Of course, having been used to working all her life this wasn't an issue and she went to stay with her cousin, who took her under her wing. It was while working in Amsterdam that she met Johannes Driessen, a chemistry student at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, who ate lunch at the cafe every day. Marijke was certainly not dumb and took advantage of the situation, always sweet and ready with some new story to tell him when he came in, and within a few months of meeting they were dating. They'd been dating for a little over six months when Johannes proposed and she accepted, but Adriaan forbade them from marrying until Marijke turned sixteen. They married not a week after her sixteenth birthday and Inge Margriet was born the next year in early March. Ernst Willem was born four years later in June and Josef Karel in 1925. Marijke's family was (and still is) her pride and joy; she'd do anything to ensure the best possible future for them. So when Josef was captured by the SS and killed in 1945, it was nearly her undoing. She had already lost both her parents and her in-laws; a son on top of that was just too much. She decided that it was best if she and the remaining family left the Netherlands to join Inge and her family in England and in June of 1945 they did just that.