How to Flee the Gestapo

Within the titanic clash of World War II, the Resistance was actually a rather small world. Only a fraction of the European population was willing to risk their necks to oppose the Nazis, or had the opportunity to do so. And most of those who did operated within local groups in a local area. Granted, […]

Here’s another story that turns on luck, sent to me by the son of an Engelandvaarder. This is a Dutch-Paris story in a very roundabout way. The Engelandvaarder, whom we’ll call Jack, made it to Spain with the help of Dutch-Paris. He then trained with the Dutch Bureau Inlichtingen (Information Bureau) and ended up working […]

The last two posts described episodes in the history of Dutch-Paris in which a stranger on the street acted spontaneously in a way that helped or hindered someone associated with Dutch-Paris. The Engelandvaarder in one of those stories assured me that he’d benefited from good luck and that luck played an important role in everyone’s […]

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 […]

An Engelandvaarder with whom I had the great honor and pleasure to correspond, told me that luck played a crucial role in his escape from the Nazis. You may or may not believe in luck, but there are at least two instances of the history of Dutch-Paris hinging on the actions of passersby that I […]

In the last post our valiant Pole Wyssogota had agreed to take Dutchmen and aviators to Spain in cooperation with a Dutch escape line based in Brussels which had connections to the Comite but was not part of Dutch-Paris. Wyssogota and the Dutchman Thijs were arrested in November 1943 and deported to the concentration camps. […]

To continue with the last post’s descriptions of Dutch-Paris’s entanglement in the Holocaust, I noticed something unexpected in my research. If you look at the Holocaust on a macro level – millions of people murdered, industrialization of death in the extermination camps, rates of deportations, process of disenfranchisement, the Nazi machinery of death appears to […]

A couple of posts ago, we were talking about how Dutch-Paris took care of the medical needs of their fugitives in Brussels and Paris. The situation was different again in the Pyrenees. The problem with guiding men over the Pyrenees in winter in the dark was that it was a hazardous trip even without the […]

What did rescuers do if a fugitive they were sheltering needed medical attention? After all, people were in hiding for years. Someone had to have developed an abscessed tooth or appendicitis. The rescuers in Dutch-Paris, who helped thousands of fugitives, developed relationships with doctors and nurses for exactly such eventualities. In Brussels, the Comité was caring […]

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 […]