How to Flee the Gestapo

In addition to courage, conviction, and intelligence, resisters needed a certain amount of luck. Dutch-Paris is full of stories of someone ringing the wrong doorbell only to be told that the Gestapo was hiding in the apartment of the right doorbell. Saved, literally, by the bell. There are also stories of bad luck. Take, for […]

It took all sorts of courage from all sorts of people to create the Dutch-Paris escape line and to rescue almost 3,000 people from the Nazis. One sort was the courage of couriers and guides who kept moving through dangerous situations with the incriminating evidence of downed aviators or other fugitives by their side. Joke […]

There’s no question that being active in the resistance to the Nazis and their collaborators took courage, firm principles and a quick wit. What, exactly, those looked like differed from one individual to the next. Even courage plays out differently for each person, and not just because each person needed to draw on their courage […]

It’s easy to forget how long the Nazi occupation of western Europe went on.  All Belgium and the northern part of France, for example, were occupied from the summer of 1940 to the summer of 1944. Most of the continent lived under the Nazi boot for longer, but even so, four years is a long […]

Here’s some encouraging news for the new year.  Last March a Dutch woman contacted me about her uncle, who had been arrested in March 1944 and deported to the concentration camps under the harshest prisoner regime (Nacht und Nebel) as a resister. Her uncle’s name did not appear in my own research notes, but I […]

Last time we talked about the arrest of a local Dutch-Paris leader under a false name in Brussels. A very similar thing happened to another Dutch-Paris leader in Paris. This man, who we’ll call Smit, had been an important leader of Dutch-Paris and other rescue groups in Brussels until the Gestapo got too close. He […]

Here’s another good question from the chat section of my WW2TV talk about Dutch-Paris. How did the resisters in Dutch-Paris who came from the Netherlands, Belgium and France and the people they helped, who came from even more countries, talk to each other? Were they all linguists? This is one of the many interesting things […]

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 […]

The reports and images of Ukrainian women fleeing with their children, leaving their menfolk behind to fight are shocking and heartbreaking. But they should not be surprising. War is an enemy to families. It breaks them apart even if no one dies. The Second World War forced all sorts of parents to send their children […]

In the past couple of posts we’ve talked about the families involved in Dutch-Paris. Some made it through the war without arrests but others were not so lucky. What happened to the children while the parents were prisoners? The documents do not go into detail about how the children navigated the last 15 months of […]