How to Flee the Gestapo

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 […]

Most of the men and women who rescued others as part of Dutch-Paris were either unmarried or old enough that their children had already left home. But there were men and women who had the courage to join even though they had young children. Sometimes it turned out alright. For example, a Jewish couple walked […]

In my last post I described a seemingly random occurrence, apparently meant as a gesture of goodwill, that had disastrous consequences for the men and women of Dutch-Paris and those they were helping. A random passerby saw a courier drop a notebook and returned it to her in front of the policemen who had arrested […]

Our last post started talking about a Dutch expatriate named Bernard as an exemplar of the confusion of the Occupation. Bernard was one of those Dutch expatriates who responded to a request for help from a refugee by creating an entire rescue network and helping just about anyone who asked for help. He was in […]

In our last post we left the Polish captain Wyssogota injured in southern France as the German army was smashing into northern France. In the summer of 1940 Hitler allowed Petain and the Vichy government to administer southern France. This was not necessarily the good news that refugees with reason to fear the Germans might […]

World War II ended in demographic chaos, with between 11 and 20 million displaced persons outside of their home countries in Europe. That’s a lot of people trying to cross frontiers, many of them suffering from malnutrition, maltreatment and trauma. Some of them had been wandering, or held against their will, since the very beginning […]