How to Flee the Gestapo

Eighty years after the American Army liberated his hometown of Maastricht on September 13-14, 1944, my father still remembers the day. This is his story of his liberation. Only six years old, he lived with his parents and older sisters in a small petit bourgeois home in the neighborhood of Wyck, east of the River […]

In a previous post I mentioned the possibility of false resisters making claims to having been in the resistance during the uncertain period of the Liberation.  It happened. Not often, but often enough that if you come across someone making claims that no one else in the resistance network verifies, you should treat those claims […]

There are lots of heart-warming stories about soldiers making their own bit of Christmas during WWII by doing things like dressing up as St. Nick and having parties for the local children. My favorite is a family story. It didn’t happen exactly on Christmas, but it did happen during the fall and winter of 1944/45. […]

Let’s continue our discussion of how private citizens have influenced the public memory of the Second World War. We began with Memorial naming the victims of the Soviet regime in the USSR. Last time we mentioned how an association in France added the name of a Dutch-Paris resister to the war monument in his home […]

It goes without saying that the stakes over public memory in Western Europe are nowhere near as high as they were when the private citizens of Memorial were challenging the Soviet Union by burying the dead lying in the forests around Stalingrad. But that does not mean that everyone in Western Europe is fully satisfied […]

Memory slips and shifts depending on the person and the time. Ask any five people what happened at a particular place and time and they will all have a slightly – if not wildly – different memory of the event. Those are personal, individual memories. Public memory, meaning the “official story” as remembered by a […]

An extraordinary woman of incredible courage passed away on 11 December 2022. At only 19 and 20 years old, Joke (pronounced Yo-ka) Folmer guided hundreds of fugitives including downed Allied aviators from the north of the Netherlands to the Belgian border. They usually rode bicycles. She passed a few of the aviators to Dutch-Paris because […]

I recently had a wonderful conversation with a Dutch woman and her mother. They’re trying to piece together the story of their father/grandfather. He was arrested on the Franco-Swiss border in 1942 and executed shortly thereafter. The family has some letters that the Engelandvaarder wrote from prison. They also have some information from the man’s […]

If you read the last few posts about families in Dutch-Paris, you may have wondered why there is hardly anything in the documents about the children left behind to fend for themselves when their parents were arrested for resistance. After all, that would not go unnoticed or undiscussed today. I suspect that there are two […]

In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let us remember the horror and inhumanity of the “Final Solution.” But let us also remember the glimmers of humanity offered by those men and women who volunteered to help Jews escape the Nazis despite the risk to themselves. Let us also remember the men and women of […]