How to Flee the Gestapo

In July 1941 a young man we’ll call Frits (born 1918) left for England with a friend we’ll call Henk. They ran out of money in Valenciennes, France, and turned back to the Netherlands.
In order to support himself and his widowed mother, Frits took a job with the CCD in The Hague as a [...]

The Dutch government-in-exile in London had a problem that is today almost inconceivable: they didn’t know what was going on in the Netherlands. Nor did they have a way to communicate with the people they claimed to represent. They had to resort to clandestine means.
One such was to microfilm reports and instructions and [...]

A friend of mine mentioned that the blog is very interesting but I’d neglected to write about how critical a role luck played in escaping Nazi Europe. He should know because he’s an Engelandvaarder who traveled from Amsterdam to Spain via Dutch-Paris. He now lives in Tasmania and has quite convinced me to move there [...]

Let us pause for a moment on this 91st anniversary of the Armistice that halted the official slaughters of the First World War (1914-1918) to remember the men and women who have died in our battles over the last century and those who’ve lived the rest of their lives under the shadow of those battles.
It [...]

The most poignant of the NARA helper files I’ve read concerns a young Dutch woman who was a student at the Sorbonne when the Germans invaded in 1940. We’ll use her nom de guerre, Anne-Marie. In the normal course of affairs, she met a man who worked at the Dutch embassy in Paris. As a member [...]

I’ve had the honor to spend an afternoon with an Engelandvaarder, one of those approximately 1,700 Dutchmen and 48 women who made the arduous journey to England during the Occupation. A few of them traveled via Dutch-Paris; although this particular gentleman did not. Let’s call him Mr. Brooks after his nom de guerre because I have neither [...]

It’s 1942 in Amsterdam and the Gestapo is after you.  Perhaps you’ve done something particular to annoy them, like printing an illegal newspaper or bailing out of an American or RAF bomber.  Maybe, because you’re a young man of military age, the occupation authorities think you should go work in Germany – essentially as slave [...]