How to Flee the Gestapo

World War II ended in demographic chaos, with between 11 and 20 million displaced persons outside of their home countries in Europe. That’s a lot of people trying to cross frontiers, many of them suffering from malnutrition, maltreatment and trauma. Some of them had been wandering, or held against their will, since the very beginning […]

I was honored to be invited to a zoom talk given by the daughter and niece of Dutch-Paris resisters about her mother’s adventurous escape from the Nazis during the war and her postwar work to help the children of victims of the Holocaust.  I can highly recommend her book about it, Motherland by Rita Goldberg. […]

If you were to think of the great moral heroes of the twentieth century, the Second World War Resistance would surely make the list. They did, after all, oppose the Nazis at great risk to themselves and their families. It’s worthwhile, however, to think about exactly who resisters fought against. At first glance the simplest […]

One of the Comet escape line’s teenage couriers recently passed away at the age of 95. Like Dutch-Paris, Comet was also created by civilians. Unlike Dutch-Paris, Comet emphasized helping Allied servicemen to evade the Nazis by either taking them from Belgium to Spain or hiding them in Belgium. Both escape lines relied on the dedication […]

One of the unusual things about Dutch-Paris was that it involved many people from many different nations working together, across borders, in a common cause. In fact, Dutch-Paris routinely operated in three languages, using five different currencies with the odd American dollar or British pound sterling thrown in. It was, indeed, the quintessential transnational escape […]

Sometimes all it takes to save a life is for another person to act forcefully on their behalf. Here’s a Dutch-Paris story that I only recently learned from the grandchild of the man concerned.  The man’s great-grandchild was doing a little family research and asked me a question, which led to me asking them quite […]

A couple of posts ago I wrote about the death of the woman who ran the boarding house that Dutch-Paris rented as a safe house on the escape line in Brussels. The 55 year-old political prisoner was gassed at the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück in January 1945. Lydia’s story offers a good example of […]

January 28th marks the 75th anniversary of the death of one of the minor players in the story of Dutch-Paris. She was a 55 year-old spinster who supported herself by running a boarding house in one of the newer neighborhoods of Brussels. We’ll call her Lydia. The archives do not have much to share about […]

Continuing on with our discussion of the use of the railways by escape lines, we should recognize the railway men who belonged to Dutch-Paris. There were two that I know of. The first was a Dutch railway official who worked at the Gare du Nord, the station where all the trains to and from the […]

Seventy-five years and a couple of weeks ago, in November 1943, Jean Weidner travelled to occupied Paris to find resisters who would be willing to join the new escape line that we know as Dutch-Paris. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could advertise in the newspapers, and Weidner hadn’t been in the city since […]