To continue with our armchair travels and plans for next year, here are four museums in Belgium and the Netherlands to put on the itinerary.

Let’s start in the small town of Leopoldsburg in Belgium close to the Dutch border, within easy reach of Brussels and Maastricht. A new museum about the Liberation of Belgium called Liberation Garden / Bevrijdingsmuseum Leopoldsburg will open in 2022. Obviously I have not visited it yet, but I do know that the director, Peter Schrijvers, is an excellent historian of the personal experience of the war. And there’s a connection with Dutch-Paris. The young resisters who were arrested at the line’s safe house in Brussels in February 1944 were transferred to a German prison in the town shortly before the Liberation of Brussels. Luckily they were not among the prisoners executed at the camp and survived the war. https://liberationgarden.be/

Heading north we reach Amsterdam, where two museums will have new exhibits relevant to Dutch-Paris.

The excellent Verzetsmuseum (Resistance Museum) is expanding into its basement to bring us an exhibit about 100 Dutch resisters. Dutch-Paris will be represented by its leader, Jean Weidner, and objects belonging to a few of the line’s other members. https://www.verzetsmuseum.org/en/expositions-and-activities

There’s a new addition coming to the top notch world of Dutch museums: what is being called the Nationaal Holocaust Museum in Oprichting / National Holocaust Museum in Development https://jck.nl/nl/nhm . It is part of the Joods Cultureel Kwartier (Jewish Cultural Quarter) which includes the Hollandsche Schouwburg, where the Nazis imprisoned Jews during round-ups in Amsterdam. Several Dutch-Paris resisters helped rescue children from it before they joined the line. The new museum will have an exhibit specifically on Dutch-Paris through the story of a particular family involved with it.  The museum will open in late 2022 or early 2023.

If we travel west to a WWII bunker overlooking the North Sea, we come to the Museum Engelandvaarders in Noordwijk aan Zee https://www.museumengelandvaarders.nl/ The museum has an interesting exhibit on Dutch-Paris, as you would expect considering how many Engelandvaarders Dutch-Paris helped to reach Spain. But it covers all the different routes taken by Engelandvaarders, who were a creative as well as courageous bunch. It’s fascinating to compare the Dutch-Paris route to these others. I know of at least one Dutch-Paris Engelandvaarder who has donated his false documents from his journey to Spain to this museum.