Andrée Antoinette Deligdisch-van Trooijen,1933-2025, was a remarkable woman who lived an extraordinary life. She was born on the then-Dutch island of Java (Indonesia), where her father Jan Hendrik van Trooijen was the Administrator of various sugar, rubber, and tea plantations.
Andrée fondly recalled her childhood playing in mountain forests with her older brother and the local children before the unthinkable happened. In 1942 Japan invaded Indonesia and occupied it until the end of World War II. Andrée was placed in a horrendously crowded prisoner-of-war women’s camp with her mother and younger sister, still a toddler, while her brother was sent to a men’s camp. Her father joined the Dutch Army and was captured, then sent to toil as a POW on forced-labor construction projects, including the infamous Burma Railway, where a great many men perished. For more than three years Andrée survived in the camps, taking care of her three-year old sister when her mother became gravely ill and almost died. Conditions in the camp were brutal, and it must have been a terrifying and bleak time for a young girl thrust into caring for what remained of her family in such difficult circumstances, but Andrée dismissed any sympathy by insisting “we were all in the same boat, we took care of each other, and we made do. I did nothing more than anyone else would have done.”
Good news would come later. After the war and the Japanese were gone, families waited anxiously for any word of the men and boys that had been taken. One of the stories Andrée enjoyed retelling came from this time. Families remained in the camps as there was nowhere else to house them until they were reunited with their loved ones and could book passage out of the country. When she wasn’t doing chores, Andrée played outside with the other children.
One day, she saw a ragged and terribly thin boy walking up the dusty road who looked vaguely familiar. The closer he got the more certain she was. She ran into the crowded hut to tell her mother to come outside; her brother Rob was coming up the road! “Stop telling stories,” her mother scolded. Having long prepared for the possibility she might never see her son or her husband again, her mother did not want her children to fantasize a reunion that seemed less likely with every passing day … and then her brother stepped through the door.
With the intervention of her uncle, an admiral in the Dutch Navy, Andrée with her mother, brother, and sister were sent to Singapore to await her father, who had been located. Barely surviving Burma, upon recovery the military had assigned him to support post-war efforts. Andrée fondly recalled that the year spent with the reunited family in Singapore was a time of sheer happiness for the kids. Young Rob and Andrée would use their parents’ daily afternoon nap to sneak out of the house and hitchhike with the omnipresent Allied soldiers all over Singapore, once even boarding a vessel, only to return just in time for afternoon tea. This was not without risk, and the story would end when Andrée, with a little smile, would confide that thankfully their parents never found out.
Together again, the family awaited passage to the Netherlands where Andrée would attend high school. She felt she didn’t fit in with her new schoolmates, however. They made fun of her colonial accent and manners, so upon graduation, Andrée made a bold decision. She applied for and received a Fullbright Scholarship to attend college in America at a place she knew little about—Missoula. Within days of her arrival, Montana felt like home.
After her first year of college, Andrée took a summer job working at a guest ranch west of Choteau. There she made lifelong friends, and also met, fell in love with, and later married Konrad Deligdisch. He was Jewish refugee from Austria who fled the country after Nazi Germany annexed it and, barely avoiding capture, eventually found himself in the Russian Army fighting at Stalingrad. He learned that his father survived the extermination camps, though many in his family did not, and moved to Israel. Konrad, a talented musician, painter, sculptor, musical instrument builder, wood carver, and photographer. He studied in France before immigrating to America and became a pioneer in cardiac sonography, and the first to be licensed to practice nuclear medicine in the State of Montana. Tragically, while on a guided tour in Guatemala, Konrad unexpectedly and quite suddenly passed away. It was a very difficult time, and Andrée got through it by persevering in her life’s work.
Perhaps because of her experiences seeing so many innocent people going through the most difficult of times, Andrée knew she wanted to be a social worker from a young age. She studied sociology at the University of Montana but after marrying Konrad moved to Great Falls where the couple purchased a bungalow on Central Avenue—the house Andrée would live in for the next 70 years—and finished her bachelor’s in social work at the College of Great Falls.
In 1956, at the age of 22, Andrée began her professional career as a case worker for the Cascade County Department of Public Welfare. In 1963 she went to Seattle to earn a master’s in sociology from the University of Washington, and following graduation in 1965 she joined the Mental Health Center in Great Falls (later the Golden Triangle Community Mental Health Center).
From 1969 to 1974 Andrée was Assistant Director of Opportunities Inc, a program to combat poverty. In 1984, she established a private practice focused on helping children in poverty and in foster care, providing marriage counseling, and, in her spare time, teaching sociology courses for the College of Great Falls. Andrée also served on the Montana Coordinated Community Childcare Council and Montana Board of Crime Control, and concentrated her practice on children, particularly with Head Start, and with mentally challenged and elder programs Park Place Health Care Center. In 1988 she was appointed to the State Board of Examiners and Professional Counselors, the licensing agency for social workers in Montana, a testament to her esteem within the profession.
In 1988, Andrée was named Montana’s Social Worker of the Year and received the Virginia Blend Memorial Award from the Cascade County Mental Health Association for a lifetime of outstanding contribution in the field of mental health. Andrée was honored for the thousands of people whose lives she touched with compassion, respect, understanding, and meaningful help.
In 1990, mutual friends introduced Andrée to Aart Dolman, then a professor of history at Northern Montana College and like her a Dutch immigrant and naturalized citizen who, similar to her, had survived occupation by Axis forces, though for Aart in Holland. They shared a deep commitment to helping others and conserving public spaces and wed a year later. They were a team. While Andrée helped make the world better one person at a time through her social work, Aart was active politically supporting legislation to help the same underserved groups. Both retired in the early 2000s and Andrée and Aart devoted much of their golden years fighting to protect federal and state lands and wilderness areas.
Andrée loved music. She and Konrad started playing recorders with several friends in the 1950s, referring to themselves as the Great Falls Recorder Group. As the group expanded, they changed their name and became the Cottonwood Consort. Mostly playing for enjoyment and camaraderie, the group would put on occasional concerts, play for weddings and other special events, and quite enthusiastically at recreations of Medieval Feasts and Renaissance Faires. Andrée also enjoyed singing and did so with the Great Falls College Glee Club, Choir, the Community Choir MSU, and a folk group called the Revelers, which Aart participated in later. She and Aart deeply enjoyed classical music and supported the Great Falls Symphony for many years.
Throughout her life, Andrée loved hiking, camping, and cross-country skiing in the mountains and prairies of Montana. She was a lifelong learner who traveled to dozens of countries and five continents enjoying museums, good food, and making friends around the world. Most of all she was kind and gentle and brave. She was a selfless servant to anyone in need, especially children, dedicating her practice to serving the most vulnerable among us. Everyone was welcome, the coffee was always on. She didn’t concern herself with your race or ethnicity, your age or religion, your money or your status. All that mattered was people in pain needed help, and it was her duty to do whatever she could to ease their burden. Andrée would dismiss such praise, but all of those she touched in her remarkable life know that she deserved much more.
Andrée was a hero, a champion for the forgotten and the underserved, and a true friend in every sense of the word. She harbored no malice, forgave all who wronged her, and made the rest of us better by her example. The sign in front of her house proudly proclaimed her life philosophy: “Love thy Neighbor: No Exceptions.” Like a candle at the end of a long day, a guiding light in this world has dimmed and gone out.
Andrée van Trooijen-Deligdisch was preceded in death by her husbands Konrad Deligdisch and Aart Dolman; father, Jan Hendrik van Trooijen; mother Marie Constance Cornelie Oosting; brother Robbert Frans van Trooijen and sister Ellen Smit. She is survived by her sister Roswitha Hendriks and brother Iskander van Trooijen; nephews and nieces Robbert Jan van Trooijen, Marion van Trooijen-Horsten, Thijs Smit, Steven Smit, and Olga Hendriks; and stepchildren Patricia Hurin, Everett Dolman, and Debora Sudan.
All are invited to attend a Memorial Service at Croxford Funeral Home, 11AM on September 13th, 2025 to remember and celebrate Andrée’s life.
To share condolences, click here to visit the Croxford Funeral Home website.
