How to Flee the Gestapo

In my last post I mentioned the legendary Comet Escape Line. It’s legendary because the men and women of Comet achieved the remarkable feat of rescuing hundreds of Allied servicemen from the Nazis. But it is also more literarily legendary as a story. It’s a legend in itself because it is the best known of […]

I had a surprising conversation with my 14 year-old son about the book he’s reading for school: Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. The most interesting part went like this: My son : “Romeo was the bad guy.” Me : “What?” My son : “He murdered two people and then he killed himself, so….” (shrug). All the […]

Weeks ago, at the beginning of the stay at home orders meant to slow the Coronavirus, an American friend forwarded a message from a Hungarian friend who was living in Switzerland. It was a poster featuring a black and white photograph of a soldier standing in the rising mist next to a small guard house. […]

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 […]

Although the most common image of the Liberation of Europeans from Nazi Occupation 75 years ago is one of joyous celebration, we should not forget that tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians paid for that liberation with their lives. The Dutch certainly haven’t. Within weeks of the liberation of my father and his neighbors […]

Let’s continue with the story of my father’s liberation from the Nazis 75 years ago in Maastricht. He was 6 years old, so his memories are the impression of a child. He remembers that American Army trucks and equipment rolled past his home day and night for days. The Dutch, who had been on short […]

Seventy-five years ago the fate of the Netherlands hung in the balance as the Allies and the Wehrmacht battled for control of the Dutch bridges over the Rhine in Operation Market Garden. The Allies lost that battle, leading to the catastrophic Hunger Winter, or man-made famine, in the northern two-thirds of the country. By that […]

I’ve finally figured out why the map on the first version of the cover for The Escape Line was wrong. I couldn’t understand why the designer had included towns that were not part of Dutch-Paris’s routes. But I had made the mistake of assuming that the designer had based the cover on the photos and […]

Here’s another example of why historians use footnotes. A few of the people Dutch-Paris helped get into Switzerland were family members of prominent French resisters. They were in danger under the German and Vichy policy of family responsibility, meaning that family members could be held as hostages or punished because of a resister’s actions. Two […]