Kate ter Horst

Kate ter Horst (born July 6 1906, Amsterdam – February 21 1992, Oosterbeek) was a Dutch nurse – later a doctor – who tended wounded and dying Allied soldiers during the Battle of Arnhem. Her British patients nicknamed her the Angel of Arnhem.

Ter Horst was born Kate Anna Arriëns, daughter of Pieter Albert Arriëns and Catharina Maingay. She married Jan ter Horst, a lawyer from Rotterdam, with whom she had six children. One of her daughters, Sophie, still resides in the family home in Oosterbeek.

During the Operation Market Garden, the British 1st Airborne Division parachuted to capture the Arnhem bridge but was outgunned by the German army. Captain Martin asked the Ter Horsts permission to set up a regimental aid post in their house at the Benedendorpsweg in Oosterbeek, to which they consented.

During the fighting of eight days, Ter Horst tended to about 300 wounded British paratroopers herself, while having four young children and being pregnant with her fifth. Some of her most famous actions in looking after the British troops are; walking around her home reading the bible to dying soldiers(and therefore giving them much needed hope) and finding water in the most unlikely places (such as the boiler and toilet) when the house was centre in conflict and if they went out they were shot.

In November 1947 her oldest son, Pieter Albert, would be killed by a WWII landmine in their garden in Oosterbeek.

She starred in a movie made directly after the war about the battle of Arnhem in which all the survivors were asked to re-act the parts they played in the battle.

In the 1977 movie A Bridge Too Far her character is played by Liv Ullmann. In 1980, the British ambassador to the Netherlands decorated Kate and her husband as Honorary Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. She died of an accident in 1992 (knocked down by a car outside her home next to the Lonsdale Church), while Jan died at the age of 98 in 2003.