How to Flee the Gestapo

At the Nationaal Archief today I asked for a file regarding the repayment of loans made to Dutch-Paris during the war. The file belonged to the records of the Dutch Embassy in Belgium and I had to read it in the section of the archives with extra surveillance. A guard sits at the top of […]

There were all sorts of ways to join the Resistance. For some, it was just another, more dynamic, way of hiding. Threatened with deportation to “the east” (i.e. the extermination camps) in 1942 like all other Jewish persons in the Netherlands, the “van Caneghem” family found a hiding place in July 1942. The parents, their daughter […]

At the risk of sounding prematurely crotchety I have to wonder if this isn’t too much to ask of a 24 year-old (my apologies to all recent college grads currently improving the world). I’ll tell you as much of the story as is in the file, which is regrettably sparse on background information. A certain […]

Following my last post about joining the Resistance, I’ll be offering a series of examples of how members of Dutch-Paris ended up in the Line. We’ll start with the chef de reseau himself,John Henry Weidner (1912-1994). Weidner’s father was a Dutch Seventh Day Adventist preacher who taught at the SDA college at Collonges sur Salève, […]

As soon as I start to tell a story, I run into the problem of names. The documents usually give the full names of the members of Dutch-Paris, with the exception of those who never told their colleagues their true name before their arrests and then deaths in deportation. But would it be right to […]