In the last post our valiant Pole Wyssogota had agreed to take Dutchmen and aviators to Spain in cooperation with a Dutch escape line based in Brussels which had connections to the Comite but was not part of Dutch-Paris. Wyssogota and the Dutchman Thijs were arrested in November 1943 and deported to the concentration camps. This time, Wyssogota did not manage to escape.

The round-up in November 1943 did not capture Thijs’s two Dutch colleagues in Paris or Mme Vassias. The 66-year-old Parisienne took command of Visigoths-Lorraine and kept it going until being arrested herself in February 1944 after the arrest of one of Wyssogota’s guides near the Spanish border. She died in Ravensbrück.

The arrest of Wyssogota and Thijs left Thijs’s two Dutch friends and colleagues stranded in Paris with more than a few Engelandvaarders hiding in hotels and private apartments waiting to go to Spain. Even if the fugitives stayed in Paris until the liberation – whenever that was going to be – they didn’t have enough money to feed them on the black market indefinitely.

This is where Dutch-Paris comes into the story as Dutch-Paris rather than the Comité. Weidner offered the two young resisters places in Dutch-Paris. One of them wanted to go off on his own, creating a separate escape line. He was, however, happy to take money from Weidner to fund that separate line. The money most probably came from the Dutch military attaché in Bern. Unfortunately that entire line was captured in March 1944, leading to deportation and many deaths.

The other young man decided to join Dutch-Paris and took responsibility for Engelandvaarders in Paris on behalf of Dutch-Paris. He organized the evacuation of many of the Dutchmen stranded in Paris after Thijs’s arrest as well as hiding places in Paris for many other Engelandvaarders as they waited for Dutch-Paris convoys to head south. He also continued to work with Mme Vassias. It is not entirely clear from the documents but he appears to have been doing intelligence work for her, and through her for the British Intelligence Service.

The point of this five post series about the Polish captain Wyssogota, other than to share a tale of bravery and adventure, is to demonstrate how very tangled and fluid life could be in Occupied Europe. It’s one, extreme example of how people who were displaced very early in the war managed to survive the occupation.  There are millions of variations on the story, many with vastly different circumstances and outcomes.  Wyssogota’s interactions with Frenchmen and Dutchmen in his pursuit of evacuating Poles also demonstrates how transnational resistance sometimes became.