Marianne Sanders-Hekster (* 1939) was born in Bandung, Indonesia, to Dutch-Jewish parents. After the Japanese invasion of the island of Java, along with her mother and siblings, she was held in various Japanese internment camps for three years, then freed in 1945. In 1950, her family moved to the Netherlands, where Marianne studied pharmacy and met her husband Gerard at the University of Leiden. She ran an academy for assistants and technicians in the healthcare professions for 25 years.
