Here you can watch the recording of the international zoom peace gathering on the 3 of December 2023 in memory of Truus Geraets. With contributions from Europe, Brazil, China, Taiwan, South Africa and the United States. Link to Youtube video.

Scrol down to read Truus biography and memories. 

Truus Biography

Truus Geraets (1930-2023) postscript

This is a text for the Dutch Newspaper 'Trouw', from Noor Hellmann; it will be published on 6th of november 2023, Truus her birthday.

For Truus Geraets, eurythmy meant a healing art of living that she practiced on four continents in different cultures. She was a bridge builder who involved people in her initiatives to improve their situation. Her decisiveness masked an underlying pain and sense of powerlessness. During a conference of the Anthroposophical Society in the Netherlands a few years ago, a frail little lady came in. Almost ninety she was. Briskly she pulled a rolling suitcase behind her, her gaze lively.

Why is it still so white here? Where are the refugees, where are Muslims?" she asked as she looked critically at the group of participants. After which she added with a prickly finger in the air and twinkling eyes, "I even had a Muslim wedding!

Truus Geraets liked to engage in discussion. She had humor but could also be fierce. That emotion was a driving force to tackle something. When she was seriously ill in 1959, she underwent an operation that was almost fatal. Afterwards, she told of her near-death experience: she was faced with the choice of staying on the other side or returning to earth. She chose the latter. The feeling that she had a gifted life motivated her to get everything out of it. She had something to do, finding inspiration in a statement by Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy: "Anthroposophy is doing what needs to be done for the world.

She had trained in eurythmy, a movement art taught in Waldorf schools. It was for her an art of living which she used as a curative educator and eurythmy therapist to help young) people with all kinds of problems on their way. She also developed new initiatives to connect people and offer them a future. She remained active until the very end. This year she hoped to give workshops at the Goetheanum, the international center for anthroposophy in Dornach, Switzerland. But physically she could no longer cope.

She often had her sights set far beyond the border. After her death, condolences poured in from all over the world. One came from South Africa from a teacher at the Inkanyezi Waldorf School in Johannesburg, she called Truus her "destiny helper" thanks to whose support she had been able to get an education and was now in front of the classroom.

In 1984 - at the time of the apartheid regime - Truus and Waldorf teacher Claartje Wijnbergh had had the bold idea of going to Johannesburg to develop projects that could bridge the gap between black and white people. They lived in a house behind fences in the neighborhood of Alexandra, one of the poorest slums where life was raw. You had to be on your guard there, but Truus was used to something: previously she had lived in a poor neighborhood in Michigan, America, where it was also bleak and unsafe. Moreover, she did not want to run away from a task she had set for herself. In the middle of the township, they set up a multicultural meeting center, The Centre for the Art of Living. A Waldorf School was to be built on the same site. Truus traveled to Germany and succeeded in raising funds with which the Inkanyezi Waldorf School was realized in 1987, in a beautiful new building. It was not the first Waldorf school in South Africa, but it was the first one that black children attended. With three hundred and sixty students now, it is the largest black Waldorf school in South Africa. Truus taught eurythmy courses in Johannesburg at the teacher training college she co-founded. She helped students seek financial support, and she also gave parents of the Inkanyezi school a leg up. In the workshops around the school, they were able to make products to sell at the market, such as cotton Waldorf dolls in dark and African costumes. Playfully, Truus got a lot done. Her ideas were practical and concrete; they did not require writing articles about inclusion. In her youth, she had already become somewhat familiar with anthroposophy. Her spiritual mother Augusta Koch, sister of Truus mother, Helena Koch, attended anthroposophical meetings and lectures and had once met Rudolf Steiner. They came from a well-to-do family that owned the first Ford with driver in Wageningen. When Helena married Arnold Geraets, she took with her a family treasure, which he, however, quickly rushed through. Even before the birth of Truus, the youngest of four children, he abandoned his family.

Truus could not be a carefree child. She grew up with an absent father and did not easily find playmates. Children looked at her strangely because she had a different last name from her mother; she felt like an outsider. She was smart, taught herself to read and write early, but in first grade she stayed home for six months on doctor's advice because of severe abdominal pain. During the war, her oldest brother, who had somewhat of a father role, was interned. Mother and the three other children were evacuated from their hometown of Wageningen. Truus was very upset to see her panic-stricken mother unable to do anything. A second evacuation followed in 1944. Truus had meningitis, but had to walk sick and well to Zeist. The family ended up at various shelters, until the last months they found shelter with a farmer in Friesland.

After the war, Truus picked up school again and got her grammar school diploma in 1949. She did not have a clear idea of the future. She worked as an assistant in a pharmacy and studied German in Utrecht for a year - it showed courage so soon after the war. But she did not like only intellectual effort and sitting in a chair. She was more practical and wanted to be involved with children. That was possible in Christophorus, a home founded by her brother and sister-in-law for children who needed special care.

She went there to help and was introduced to an eurythmist who did weekly exercises with a little girl with a severe disorder. Truus became impressed when she saw the girl benefiting greatly from the treatment, and realized she had found her calling. She took a one-year course in remedial pedagogy in Germany and a course in artistic eurythmy in Dornach. "The miraculously effective eurythmy" she considered "an extremely effective way to engage meaningfully in the world," she later wrote in her book "The Healing Effect of Eurythmy. It was translated into several languages, including recently into Chinese. Working with children gave her joy and life energy. Especially "difficult cases" she found a challenge. She usually knew intuitively what someone needed and devised exercises and games while improvising. A reluctant little boy who always kept away watched curiously as she took off her socks and drew spirals on sheets of paper with a crayon between her toes. Gradually becoming enthusiastic, he eventually joined in.

Her first job abroad was in Scotland at the Garvald School for children with disabilities. She had gone there with the German remedial pedagogue Barbara Benz. They had become close friends in Holland and shared life and work. Together they founded an institute in Germany four years later for children who were severely limited or severely damaged. After a good start, however, they faced new laws and regulations that prevented them from continuing in the way they wanted. They decided to quit Haus Columban; Truus wanted to be able to work in freedom. She traveled after Barbara who had left for Michigan, but there was no room in Barbara's new existence to build something new together. Truus had to find her own way. She started teaching eurythmy at several American Waldorf schools and single-handedly fixed up her home in a black slum neighborhood in Kalamazoo.

Neighbors marveled at this independent white woman who was undeterred by all the crime and mistrust in the neighborhood. She had an eye for people in hopeless situations and one day walked into the immense Jackson State Prison in Michigan. She was eager to do something for the inmates and managed to start doing eurythmy with them. Guards also wanted to participate. During her conversations with prisoners, he developed an intense contact in 1979 with Dawud, who had been incarcerated for ten years. She was approaching fifty, he was eighteen years younger to the day. Truus called it a karmic encounter and recognized in him a soul mate. They married in prison. Because he had become a Muslim, the marriage was blessed by an imam. After his release, she hoped her positive influence on Dawud was permanent, but despite his good intentions, he slipped again. From a relationship with another woman, he had a child. It was a hard time for Truus that ended in divorce. Yet she continued to love him and felt a deep, spiritual bond. At the end of her life, she would sometimes look back on those years, but she would also abruptly break off such a personal conversation, spring to her feet and say, "So, shall we go to the kitchen and get something tasty?

By now she had settled permanently in Driebergen, a very different environment from California, where she had lived for years before. Traveling became more difficult, although she still very much wanted to go to China, where her heart lay since she had been there 5 times to give (heil)eurythmy lessons at various Waldorf schools all over China. For years she had attended and co-organized meetings worldwide of the World Social Initiative Forum, an international network she had set up in 2000, together with Ute Craemer, who worked in Brazilian favelas. With spiritually inspired social initiatives, the forum targets poverty, inequality and marginalization. For example, one of the forums took place in Japan with Muslims who are a discriminated minority there. Truus was at home everywhere and displaced at the same time. Again and again she had crossed oceans and knew periods of loneliness when she started something new in another continent. She had a deep religious faith and a positive nature, but underneath it school sadness. It was a kind of pain of not really belonging anywhere. Thus she sometimes got the idea that people with a certain status within the International Anthroposophical Society did not take her quite seriously as an anthroposophist. Partly the sadness also had to do with a great sensitivity to suffering and injustice in the world. She experienced helplessness but tried to ward it off by being constantly active.

She suffered from heart failure and, due to declining strength, was able to carry out fewer and fewer plans. Yet she wanted to continue, against the odds. After a heart attack last September, she called 911 herself and ended up in the cardiac ward of the Diakonessenhuis in Utrecht. She was so weakened that the doctors could do nothing more for her. Wearily she walked behind a walker, but she said confidently, I cant leave in the middle of life, can I? Today, Nov. 6, Truus would have turned 93.

memories of Truus Geraets  from around the world:

Seitdem sind wir in losem, manchmal engen Konakt gebieben, immer bemueht,Anthroposphie mit den marginalisierten Menschen in Verbindung zu bringen. Nicht nurin der Theorie sondern ganz praktisch unter Einsatz des Lebens.

Im Jahr 2000 , als ich Brasilien wegen Highjacking ein Jahr verlassen musste, nahmTruus mich in ihrer Wohnung in Kalifornien auf. Dort geschahen zwei wesentlicheDinge: wir bewegten die Idee, eine Drittweltkonferenz im Goetheanum, als demspirituellen Zentrum der Anthroposophie,zu veranstalten; und zweitens die Lektuereder Imagination des Erzengels Uriel

Erstes wurde in der Michaelikonferenz im Goetheanum als World Social forumvorgschlagen, verwirklichte sich zuerstals regionale Tagungen in USA, Suedafrika undBrasilien bis es seit 2025 unter der Leitung von Joan Sleigh unter dem Namen Worldsocial initiative forum weltweit wirken konnte..

Der Erzengel Uriel war immer ein Leitbild. Warum? Weil Uriel, dieser etwas von denMenschen, auch den anthroposophischen, vernachlassigte Erzengel, unseren Blick aufdie Erdennoete lenkt. Genauer: Uriel schaut mit ernstem Blick auf die menschlichenFehler, die sich von der Erde aufsteigen und sichtbar werden. Hauptintention desErzengels Uriel ist es, das moralische Gewissen in den Menschenherzen zu erwecken.Gewissen als Bewusstsein fuer die Erdenneote und als Tat, dank dieses BewusstseinsNoete zu lindern.

Damit hat Truus nicht nur in mir sondern durch ihre Lebenshaltung und Lebenstat vielbewrirkt: seelische undgeistige Erdenoete zu lindern, und dies auf 4 Kontinenten. Siewar unermueldich bis zuletzt Mesnchen zu erwecken, sich dieser Noete anzunehmen

Vielleicht, so wie es einer ihrer Bewunderer schrieb, ist dieser in ihr lebendigemanichaische Seele auch weiterhin taetig.  Ute

11 oktober 2023 op 02:27   I met Truus a mere 6 months before she left the States, when I moved to Orange County California from Asia. It was a destiny meeting. I had had a vision of a 'Master'who was waiting for me, and when I met her, she looked a little like the very crude picture I had drawn of a woman with short hair, except she had no glasses. I had the opportunity to speak to her of my life's challenges and received deep understanding and loving words of wisdom. She shared a little out of her own life's experience with the man she loved in South Africa, which made a deep impression on me short as it was.She gave me as well as my children eurythmy exercises. I was lucky to visit her in her home where she played the piano for my friend and I who were visiting her with our children. When she wore her glasses to look at the music with her head at an angle I cried out in delight for that was the very picture I had drawn, more than 2 years before while still living in Asia! Her warmth and wisdom made me feel she was someone who was truly living with the Christ light within her. I have thought of her often during these last few years and wished that our association could have been longer. Now I know she will be able to hear my thoughts, and I will hold her in mine with love when we read and study in the various groups I belong to. With much love, as well as joyous celebration for your birth into the spiritual world dear Truus.  Rajee

10 oktober 2023 op 09:46  Truus, daar hoorde ik over als jonkie in de euritmie. Ik ben geboren 1970. Tot ze haar boeken bracht en in Nederland bij de Vereniging van Euritmietherapeutenkwam. Er kwam ontmoeting met haar. Ze deelde haar werk en passie, was ook heelgeinteresseerd in wat hier gebeurde. Overheersen deed het gevoel dat ze nog wildeoverdragen, na zoveel jaren ervaringen te hebben opgedaan en er haar geheel eigenverwerking aan had gegeven, door haar beeldende werk.

Zo draag ik de kleine sterke heldere vrouw als beeld in mij.

Martine Meursing, euritmietherapeut

10 oktober 2023 op 10:59 Liebe Truus, Ich halte Dich in Erinnerung, als Individuum, kraftvoll, begeisterungsfähig undunkonventionell. Du hast Dich zur Weltenbürgerin gemacht und für die unprivilegiertenund die Eurythmie besonders eingesetzt. Das bleibt bewundernswert. Wir gingengemeinsam durch die Schwangerschaftsfreuden und Geburtswehen Deines Buches"Die Heilende Wirkung der Eurythmie". Ich bedanke ich mich für alles, was wirgemeinsam erleben und schaffen durften. Du hast die irdische Hülle abgelegt. Für michbist Du, wie Deine Eltern und Geschwister, nicht gestorben, sondern nur eine"Haustüre" weiter gegangen. Mögen Deine Samen auf fruchtbare "Böden" in denHerzen der Menschen gefallen sein.

Herzlich, Dein Neffe Christoph

16 oktober 2023 op 08:48   Truus was quite a special and revered presence at The City School and many wanted to work with her at that time. to my misfortune i did not know therefore value Truus for all that she was. i was new to Waldorf education and understood nothing about Eurhythmy. on top of that i was too burdened with my own problem thoughts of my child not meeting up to the norms of society's standards. an ego problem but i didn't realize that till more recently.

i do remember sitting with her in the home of a teacher she was house sitting for and on that day i had brought over some lunch to share together. as we sat at the table after the meal, Truus asked if i would join her for a cup of tea. i declined, so she started to make herself a cup. to this day, that moment of Truus making that cup of tea remains deeply etched in my memory. the way she treated that whole process of making the tea, from boiling the water, pouring the hot water over the teabag, waiting for it to steep,then adding the spoon of sugar, the milk, the careful stirring and removing the teabag,the spoon, to lifting the cup up to take in the fragrance and then finally sipping that tea,it was as if that cup of tea was THE cup of tea… i sat next to her at that small table,quietly observing her, quite a bit perplexed yet entranced by her reverence and complete absorption in that ceremony of making that cup of tea. i watched her, as she sipped that tea with such joy and pleasure, smiling with her whole being. every little move that brought that tea to her lips was a moment to be cherished… it made me regret not having joined her and i even wondered if there was something magical about that tea, that i would've taken a secret sip if she had looked away, except she didn't she stayed with that most precious cup of tea and in full presence of that moment, just her and that cup of tea…

after nearly two decades, i think, although i can't be sure, but i think i know what had been so special about that moment. it was her wholehearted gratefulness for that moment, of something so simple and so common everyday but nonetheless to her, a treasure, and her full and un compromised attention to that small cup of tea. that was what had made that moment so engrossing to me as observer and so inspiring for reasons i did not yet understand. that moment with her captured so many elements still new to me at that point in time, but i remember that moment like it was yesterday because she imbued such beauty into the space she and i shared that day.

 i wish so much i had the maturity to have known her better, to have understood and to have had some glimpse of what she saw through her perceptions. but i was at the very beginning of a journey into myself then. to have been in the presence of someone like Truus indicates to me that i was in a very good place but to my yet unseeing self at that time, i had little idea what good company i was in.

i can say now with sincere appreciation, wow, what an honor it had been. too bad for me i didn't realize with whom i had sat for lunch that day nearly two decades ago…

the picture of Truus posted here on this site, she is just as i remember her all those many years, as if time played no effect on her physically whatsoever. truly amazing…! if anything, her radiance is even more than i remember!

thank you Truus. thank you.

with deep reverence,

susan higa

10 oktober 2023 op 17:58  Lieve Peettante Truus, Mijn hele leven was jij een deel van mijn bestaan. We raakteelkaar uit de ogen en vonden elkaar weer. Ik wilde met mijn verzamelde airmiles naarZuid Afrika om je daar te bezoeken, maar veranderde mijn plan en gebruikte ze vooreen vlucht naar California. Daar liepen we elkaar tegen het lijf op de Vrije school. Ikhelpen dat je boek tekeningen druk rijp konden worden door de scan van de potloodtekeningen in de computer te bewerken. Sinds dien hebben we veel samen beleefd enmocht ik je bezoek ontvangen tijdens je reizen naar China. Deze Zomer kon ik nog bijje voorbij komen. Dank je voor alles wat we samen mochten beleven. Paul Gradenwitz.

10 oktober 2023 op 02:02   Lieve Truus,   We konden het goed met elkaar vinden, praten over beweging en kunst. Ik ontmoetteje in Zuid-Afrika, bij mijn moeder waar jullie een huis samen deelden. Ik maaktebewegingstheater en jij gaf euritmie. Vol moed en enthousiasme ondernam je allerleiprojecten om mensen te helpen. Bewonderingswaardig zolang als je door bleef werkenom in je levens onderhoud te voorzien voordat je uiteindelijk weer terug kwam naarNederland, om daar je laatste jaren in betrekkelijke rust door te brengen. Je was ookaltijd positief gestemd, je was iemand die mogelijkheden zag. Zo kon ik je eenverassingsbezoekje brengen. Gelukkig maar want dat was mijn laatste bezoek. Nuneemt mijn moeder je bij de hand om je de mooie tuin van daarboven te laten zien.Vaarwel lieve Truus,   Machteld Wijnbergh.

7 oktober 2023 op 21:58   Een leegte blijft over nu Truus er niet meer is.

Wat blijft zijn de mooie herinneringen aan een bijzonder mens.

Truus stond altijd klaar voor anderen en de minder bedeelden in de wereld.

Waar ik blij om ben is dat Truus lang bij ons is gebleven en niet een lang ziekbed heeft gehad.

Ik wens de familie en nabestaanden sterkte met dit verlies. Tom Jutte.

A void remains now that Truus is no longer there.

What remains are the beautiful memories of a special person.

Truus was always there for others and the less fortunate in the world.

What I am happy about is that Truus stayed with us for a long time and did not have along illness.

I wish the family and relatives strength with this loss. Tom Jutte.

7 oktober 2023 op 17:05   I worked with Truus during the 1980,s at a yearly meeting between Camphill and Waldorf teachers in New Hampshire. She brought her wisdom from South Africa.

Later we worked together in the Board for Therapeutic Eurythmy in North America. She visited and stayed with me when I was working in the first public Waldorf school in the U.S. in Milwaukee Wisconsin.

Every meeting and work with Truus was lively and brilliant,   Mary Ruud.