How to Flee the Gestapo

Let’s continue our discussion of the shapes of resisters’ daily lives. Today, going underground vs. working from home. Going underground meant breaking all contact with your family, neighborhood and place of business to devote yourself to full-time resistance work. This was a drastic step because you had to live like an outlaw in your own […]

Let’s dive deeper into the factors that shaped the practical realities of a resister’s daily life. We’ll start with what sort of illegal work an individual was doing. Broadly speaking you can break down resistance work into four large categories: armed resistance (sabotage, partisan battles); intelligence work (gathering information); welfare (hiding people, supporting the needy […]

In my last post I wrote about how resisters in their own small community had to consider the current and future needs of that community. But there were, of course, examples of resistance actions in larger places where resisters acted without as much thought for the local residents. In France, for example, there were times […]

When you’re thinking about resistance during the Second World War, you have to remember that most of it happened within communities where people lived and expected to continue living. In those cases, things got very “delicate” as the French say, because the people involved had to weigh the immediate German reaction to something against their […]

War does not spare children. They are injured, maimed and killed by bullets, missiles and shrapnel. They spend anxious nights in underground shelters while their homes are bombed. They go hungry. They are orphaned. During the Second World War the Nazis deliberately murdered children alongside their parents as part of their crazed plans of social […]

If you’re thinking about the Second World War and especially about the resistance, you have to keep in mind how immensely complicated life got when the Nazis occupied an area. In particular, civilians were unmoored from many of the structures of daily life that organized their pre-war world. In particular, it was always best to […]

In the last post our valiant Pole Wyssogota had agreed to take Dutchmen and aviators to Spain in cooperation with a Dutch escape line based in Brussels which had connections to the Comite but was not part of Dutch-Paris. Wyssogota and the Dutchman Thijs were arrested in November 1943 and deported to the concentration camps. […]

In our last post we left the Polish captain turned resister Wyssogota on a deportation train heading to the concentration camps in the Third Reich in April 1943. Never one to accept a bad situation, our man was among 50 men who jumped from the train on the German side of the Rhine. Although he […]

In our last post we left the intrepid Polish captain Wyssogota making the surprising choice to leave the Free Zone of Vichy France to go to Paris in occupied France. It didn’t take him long to realize how mistaken his assumptions that he could get to England via Belgium had been. In November 1942, the […]

In our last post we left the Polish captain Wyssogota injured in southern France as the German army was smashing into northern France. In the summer of 1940 Hitler allowed Petain and the Vichy government to administer southern France. This was not necessarily the good news that refugees with reason to fear the Germans might […]