In addition to courage, conviction, and intelligence, resisters needed a certain amount of luck. Dutch-Paris is full of stories of someone ringing the wrong doorbell only to be told that the Gestapo was hiding in the apartment of the right doorbell. Saved, literally, by the bell.

There are also stories of bad luck. Take, for example, a woman we’ll call Mary. She lived in Paris in the neighborhood around the Sorbonne. She knew Brother Rufus and that he was collecting food for fugitives. It’s not clear if she knew what sort of fugitives he was helping or how he was helping them.

One day in February 1944, Mary was walking along the street, quite possibly on her way to pray at the chapel or maybe on her way home, and saw the shocking sight of Brother Rufus in handcuffs being put into a German car by German soldiers. Instead of hurrying on her way, she gawked so long that the Gestapo arrested her as well.

The Gestapo actually released Mary after a couple of hours, figuring that she really was just an innocent by-stander. Then Mary went home. Only to have the Gestapo come pounding on her door late that night because the doorkeeper at Brother Rufus’s convent told them that Mary had told him about Brother Rufus’s arrest.

That was enough to get her sent to the concentration camp of Ravensbrück for a year.

Was Mary a resister? Yes in the sense that the Gestapo thought she was and she spent a year as a political prisoner because of it. But we don’t have enough information about her to know if she belonged to a resistance group of not.

Was Mary part of Dutch-Paris? Yes in the casually auxiliary way of donating food to fugitives being helped by Dutch-Paris. And yes in the auxiliary way of being punished for being part of Dutch-Paris according to the Gestapo, who were fining with the idea of unproven guilt by association.

But she didn’t act like a resister. Anyone else in the line would have hurried away from the sight of a colleague being arrested. Maybe doing an about face and running in the opposite direction would have been too suspicious, but certainly they would have kept walking. And most of them would have found somewhere else to spend the night after an afternoon at Gestapo HQ if they possibly could.

What we can say for sure is that if Mary hadn’t been walking down the street at that exact moment, she would never have been arrested, let alone deported to the concentration camps. She was a woman with a kind heart and terrible luck.