How to Flee the Gestapo

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 […]

Seventy-five years ago, on August 25, 1944, the German garrison of Paris surrendered after five days of street fighting. There were parties in the streets, a huge parade, a Te Deum at Notre Dame cathedral. The German occupation authorities had not followed Hitler’s order to destroy the city, but they had not been as merciful […]

August 15th marks the 75th anniversary of the Allied Landings in southern France on the beaches of Provence, known as Operation Dragoon. These are not as well remembered as the Allied Landings in Normandy a couple months earlier. But the people who lived there and the German troops and their collaborators who were still in […]

Today, July 14, is Bastille Day, the French national holiday celebrating freedom and democracy. It shouldn’t be any surprise that during WWII the Vichy regime banned the celebration of Bastille Day. This created a bit of a conundrum in 1944. In those parts of France that were definitively liberated by July 14, people celebrated publicly […]

German counter-espionage officers stationed in occupied Holland, Belgium and France were highly professional and effective.  They did not, for example, hare right off to raid every address that they tortured out of a Dutch-Paris courier in mid-February 1944.   They knew that the courier’s colleagues would be hiding and they could wait for those colleagues to […]

Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, on 11 February 1944, several men and women who belonged to Dutch-Paris met for lunch in Paris at a Chinese restaurant that was probably on the rue Monsieur le Prince in the Latin Quarter near the Sorbonne. It wasn’t a happy meeting. Paris wasn’t a happy place in early 1944. Food […]

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 […]

A little more than 75 years ago, on 8 September 1943 Italy surrendered to the Allies. The next day, on 9 September 1943, German troops occupied the Alpine departments of France bordering Switzerland and Italy that had been the Italian occupation zone since early November 1942. This counted as a catastrophe for unknown thousands of […]

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 […]