How to Flee the Gestapo

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 […]

The last post talked about cracks in the Nazi machinery of extermination as seen on the micro level of Dutch-Paris families. In Brussels, for example, German labor officials rounded young men off the streets without once asking about racial or political affiliation. They focused entirely on getting bodies to the factories. That sort of prioritization […]

Let’s continue the discussion of who was the enemy of the resistance during WWII. The simple answer is the Nazis and all the Germans who obeyed the Nazi government, particularly the Wehrmacht and police agencies. But reality is never that simple. The enemy of the resistance was both Nazis (people) and Nazism (worldview). We’ll start […]

Sometimes all it takes to save a life is for another person to act forcefully on their behalf. Here’s a Dutch-Paris story that I only recently learned from the grandchild of the man concerned.  The man’s great-grandchild was doing a little family research and asked me a question, which led to me asking them quite […]

I am equally pleased to let you know of the publication of another book involving Dutch-Paris: Luck through Adversity: The Memoir of a Dutchman’s Flight to Freedom through the Dutch-Paris Escape Line of World War II by Pieter Rudolph Zeeman. Any of you familiar with the story of Dutch-Paris will remember Rudy Zeeman as the […]

I’m tremendously pleased to let you know about the recent publication of The Weidners in Wartime: Letters of Daily Survival and Heroism under Nazi Rule by Janet Holmes Carper. Janet and I have become friends through our overlapping research and she has been more than generous with her help. In fact, it’s possible that it […]