How to Flee the Gestapo

Today, May 5, is the 74th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands. The Dutch have a big party to celebrate every five years. But every single year they commemorate the war and occupation on May 4 with solemn memorials across the country attended by huge crowds. It’s not that the Dutch weren’t happy or […]

Two posts ago, on November 18, I wrote about the arrest of a young Dutchman named Paul.  Although he was in charge of daily operations for the Comite and knew the names of other resisters and the hiding places of many Jews, the Germans thought he was caught by accident and of little account. His […]

A history book about an event in living memory is never finished. Sure, the historian can spend years reading thousands of documents in over 30 archives, but there will still be details that aren’t in the documents. This is especially true in the case of Dutch-Paris because it was a clandestine network spread over half […]

Some weeks ago I joined other volunteers at the Yankee Air Museum in Belleville, Michigan, for their annual bomber buffing. That’s when we all get clean cloths and little pots of aluminum polish to shine up the museum’s B-17 bomber before it makes its annual rounds of air shows. It was thrilling to stand on […]

I thought I’d say a little more about why it’s so appropriately symbolic that The Escape Line was officially released on May 5, the anniversary of the Liberation of the Netherlands. It would have been even more appropriate if the book had been released on May 4 because that’s the day that the Dutch commemorate […]

As I discussed in my last post, resisters sometimes got lost in the confusion of war because their aliases worked so well. There were also cases in which a resister accomplished so much and became so well-known by his or her wartime pseudonym that the false name became part of the resister’s postwar identity. For […]

I’ve been thinking about resisters’ families since my last blog but I can’t come to any conclusion. The men and women of Dutch-Paris had many different family situations during the war. Weidner himself was married, but did not have children. There were widowed women with grown children; young men and women who lived with their […]

I am happy to report that the Dutch translation of my book on Dutch-Paris has arrived from the printers. Many thanks to Maarten Eliasar, Hélène Lesger and the rest of the production team for the terrific job they did with the translation, the copy editing, the illustrations and all the details that have made it […]

Seventy-two years ago, on 28 February 1944, German police arrested a number of Dutch-Paris helpers in a well-organized sweep. Officers from the Abwehr (German military intelligence), Geheime Feldpolizei (secret military police) and Gestapo (secret state police) cooperated in the raids. One group invaded the Dutch-Paris safe house in Brussels at the same time that other […]

Almost 70 years ago, on 5 February 1945, Russian soldiers liberated John Weidner’s younger sister Gabrielle from a sub-camp of the notorious women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück. On that day, Gabrielle was in what passed as the infirmary, although there was no medicine, no heat, barely any blankets. The only thing that made it an […]