An Engelandvaarder with whom I had the great honor and pleasure to correspond, told me that luck played a crucial role in his escape from the Nazis. You may or may not believe in luck, but there are at least two instances of the history of Dutch-Paris hinging on the actions of passersby that I know of. Their effects were both negative and positive.
Here’s an example of a negative consequence.

In early February 1944, French collaborationist police arrested a young Dutch-Paris courier at a café in Paris on the grounds that she “looked Jewish” (she was not) and that she had a bag of food with her. The food was meant for aviators to eat as they crossed the Pyrenees but just as easily could have been part of a black market trade.

The police agents obliged the courier to go with them to the police station. As they walked along the sidewalk, the courier tossed a small notebook out of her pocket. A passerby politely called her attention to it and returned the notebook. Of course the police immediately confiscated it. And when they turned her over to the Germans three days later, they also turned over the notebook. It had less than a handful of incomplete names and addresses in it.

The usual response to this story is to debate whether or not the courier should have written anything down. Let’s ignore that for now and look at that moment on the sidewalk. A man who was also walking on the sidewalk saw the young woman drop her notebook and went out of his way to return it to her.  You assume that he meant well, the same way that if you saw a woman drop her gloves in a parking lot you would draw her attention to it. But didn’t that man notice that something was amiss? After all, the woman who’d dropped the notebook was under arrest in a city occupied by a foreign army.

But maybe the police officers weren’t in uniform. In fact, given that they belonged to a notorious special collaborationist unit, they probably weren’t. So the young woman was walking with two men, one of whom probably had his hand on her arm. It could have looked innocent enough.

But didn’t this good Samaritan see the courier’s face? Wouldn’t that have tipped him off? Maybe he was behind the trio and saw nothing but the notebook.
Or maybe the stranger did see that this woman was under arrest and drew the conclusion that she was trying to get rid of evidence. If he then made sure the police got the notebook, he was effectively working on the side of the collaborators. He might not have seen it that way. He might have thought of himself as a perfect gentleman who had the opportunity to support the forces of law and order. But, effectively, he was abetting the Nazis.

Clueless good Samaritan or self-satisfied supporter of the status quo, the man’s action of returning the notebook had serious consequences for Dutch-Paris and the people they were helping. We can’t be certain, but without the notebook the French police might not have turned her over to the Germans. Or the Germans might not have been successful in their brutal interrogations that led to the arrests of dozens more people. Those arrests led to more torture, deportations, deaths and the orphaning of children.

For whatever reason the pedestrian returned the notebook to the courier, that action moved her arrest towards a darker outcome. It was, from the courier’s perspective, unlucky that that man just happened to be passing by at that moment and noticed the notebook. He could have been delayed crossing the street. Or distracted by the sight of a beautiful woman on the other side of the street.

There are hundreds of “could have’s” in this story. The point is simply that a random intersection of a person with no involvement with Dutch-Paris with a person involved with Dutch-Paris changed the course of the story. It wasn’t the only time that happened.