Mona Louise Parsons
Mona Louise Parsons (February 17, 1901 – November 28, 1976) was a Canadian actress and nurse who helped the Dutch resistance during World War II. She hid Allied airmen in her home Ingleside near Laren and became the only Canadian female civilian imprisoned by the Nazis. She was one of the first women tried by a Nazi military tribunal in the Netherlands and received thanks from Allied leaders for protecting pilots.
Parsons was born in Middleton, Nova Scotia. She studied elocution and acting in Nova Scotia and Boston, acted in community productions, and spent time teaching elocution in Arkansas. She moved to New York City in 1929 to work in the Ziegfeld Follies and later trained as a nurse, graduating cum laude from the Jersey School of Medicine in 1935. In 1937 she married Dutch businessman Willem Leonhardt in the Netherlands.
When Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, Parsons joined a diverse resistance group. She sheltered downed airmen at Ingleside and arranged for their escape paths to reach Britain via Leiden and the sea.
Parsons was arrested by the Gestapo on September 29, 1941. She was held in Amstelveen and Amsterdam, and in December 1941 was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death, later commuted to life with hard labor. She worked in German prisons until March 1945, when she escaped with Dutch Baroness Wendelien van Boetzelaer. They walked through Germany for about 125 kilometers, using acting to avoid detection, and eventually reached the Netherlands and sought Allied help.
After the war, Parsons learned of complicated inheritance issues involving her husband. She returned to Nova Scotia in 1957, remarried Major General Harry Foster in 1959, and lived in Nova Scotia until her death in 1976. She is buried in Willowbank Cemetery in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Her story was honored in a 2005 Heritage Minute, a 2017 statue in Wolfville, and a 2023 Canada Post stamp.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 20:41 (CET).