It took all sorts of courage from all sorts of people to create the Dutch-Paris escape line and to rescue almost 3,000 people from the Nazis.

One sort was the courage of couriers and guides who kept moving through dangerous situations with the incriminating evidence of downed aviators or other fugitives by their side.

Joke (pronounced Yo-Ka) Folmer told me about that when I had the great honor of talking to her in Amsterdam in 2016. As a young woman, Folmer escorted hundreds of downed Allied aviators across the Netherlands and into Belgium, where she passed them to other escape lines including Dutch-Paris.  She usually walked and cycled the entire length of the country with men who stuck out in their habits and their inability to speak Dutch. She was eventually and perhaps inevitably caught and deported to the concentration camps.  Fortunately, she survived and returned home.

Joke told me that she used every sense to navigate those journeys, including smell.  She would stand at street corners and sniff the air. The Germans had better quality tobacco than the Dutch civilians did, and the scent of it traveled far. It was one way of locating her enemy.

Joke also told me that there were times when fear threatened to overwhelm her. At those times she had to give herself a stern talking to in order to keep moving forward.

Even for a woman with demonstrably great courage like Joke Folmer, courage is not easy. It can falter. It needs discipline and determination to back it up and shore it up.