Mona Parsons was a remarkable Nova Scotian whose wartime story went largely unrecognized for decades.
On my visit to Wolfville, Nova Scotia, I made a point of stopping at Willowbank Cemetery to learn more about a remarkable woman buried there who joined the Dutch resistance and helped hide and move dozens of downed Allied airmen to safety, evading capture for over a year. Her name was Mona Parsons, and for most of her life, almost no one knew what she had done.
Mona was born in Wolfville, the daughter of Colonel Norval Parsons, a First World War veteran.
As a young woman, the small-town girl dreamed of the stage, and for a time she danced as a chorus girl in New York’s famed Ziegfeld Follies during the 1920s. When that career stalled, she reinvented herself again, training as a nurse and graduating at the top of her class.
By 1937, at 36, Mona had built an independent life for herself in New York when she met Willem Leonhardt, a wealthy Dutch businessman touring the city who needed a guide. Five months later, they were married. Mona left her nursing career behind for good, and the couple settled in Laren, near Amsterdam, in a grand home they built together and named “Ingleside.” It was an ordinary life of privilege — until the Nazis invaded in 1940, and Ingleside quietly became something else entirely: a safe house.
Downed Allied airmen were brought to the estate and sheltered there for days at a stretch, hidden behind a false spot in the master bedroom closet whenever German soldiers came searching. From there, the wider resistance network moved them toward the coast, where boats ferried them out to meet British submarines and, eventually, safe passage home to England.
For about a year, the work went undetected. Then a Nazi informer betrayed the network and Mona was arrested in September 1941, Willem in December.
She was tried before a Nazi military tribunal (one of the first and few women to face one in the Netherlands ) and was condemned to death by firing squad for helping Allied airmen escape. She was permitted to appeal, and her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment at hard labour.
Women’s Prison, Vechta, Germany.
In January 1945, while at Vechta prison, she met Baroness Wendelien van Boetzelaer. On March 25, 1945, during an Allied bombing raid, the two women escaped together. For three weeks they walked across Germany, posing as aunt and niece. Mona made her way to the small Dutch town of Vlagtwedde, near the German border, where she was found by Canadian soldiers of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders, including Clarence Leonard, who was stunned to learn this emaciated woman was from Wolfville, just 100 kilometres from his own home city of Halifax. Willem, who had also been liberated from a Nazi camp, rejoined her about a month later.
Nova Scotia Highlander, Clarence Leonard
After Willem died in 1956, Mona married Harry Foster, a childhood friend from Wolfville. They lived together at Lobster Point, near Chester, Nova Scotia, until Harry died of cancer in 1964. Mona eventually moved back to Wolfville in 1970, where she lived quietly until her death on November 28, 1976. She was 75.
I noticed that the headstone at Willowbank Cemetery made no mention of her wartime heroism at all, it simply read “Wife of Major General Harry Foster.”
An official letter of recognition to Mona Leonhardt from the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
