How to Flee the Gestapo

On 29 July 1944 the Germans executed a Frenchman we’ll call Albert for what they called terrorism and aiding and abetting the enemy.
He was certainly guilty: he’d been in charge of organizing passages to Spain for Allied airmen and resistants from November 1942 until his arrest and subsequent torture in Toulouse on 15 May 1944. [...]

Just because dossiers on resisters are now available, doesn’t mean that the dossiers have more information than a name and date of birth (sometimes not even that). But sometimes you can piece together a portrait out of bits from different archives.
Take the example of Dr. Dreyfus. I first came across the name [...]

Around the same time that the French started to open up their WWII archives (the 1990’s), they also started to collect the testimonies of Resistants. As part of this effort, the Center for the History and Documentation of the Resistance in Lyon videotaped a woman who had been an important courier for Dutch-Paris. We’ll call [...]

I’m taking the title of this blog and the following story from an article published by the Resistance newspaper Het Parool in 1947. It’s the story of how a young man (b. 1918) who we’ll call Valmont joined Dutch-Paris.
As many other Dutch Jews did in 1942, Valmont joined a “convoy” to get to Switzerland, but [...]

There were all sorts of ways to join the Resistance. For some, it was just another, more dynamic, way of hiding.
Threatened with deportation to “the east” (i.e. the extermination camps) in 1942 like all other Jewish persons in the Netherlands, the “van Caneghem” family found a hiding place in July 1942. The parents, their daughter and [...]

Following my last post about joining the Resistance, I’ll be offering a series of examples of how members of Dutch-Paris ended up in the Line. We’ll start with the chef de reseau himself,John Henry Weidner (1912-1994).
Weidner’s father was a Dutch Seventh Day Adventist preacher who taught at the SDA college at Collonges sur Salève, France, [...]

Say it’s 1943 and you’ve had enough of the Occupier and his brutal ways. You know there’s a Resistance because you’ve read the illegal press and you’ve heard the rumors. You want to join, but how? It’s not like you can walk down to the local recruiting office or look them up in the phone [...]