January 28th marks the 75th anniversary of the death of one of the minor players in the story of Dutch-Paris. She was a 55 year-old spinster who supported herself by running a boarding house in one of the newer neighborhoods of Brussels. We’ll call her Lydia.

The archives do not have much to share about Lydia. The Comité rented her entire boarding house in December 1943 to serve as Brussels HQ for the Dutch-Paris escape line. She was arrested along with everyone else in that house early in the morning of February 28, 1944. There were 10 Allied aviators sleeping in the house that morning, damning everyone there with the capital crime of aiding the Occupiers’ enemy. It is not known if Lydia was tortured along with the young men captured that morning. She was put into St Gilles prison in Brussels, but deported to the concentration camps a mere three days before the city’s liberation. The young men were transferred to a camp in Belgium, not deported.

Lydia was gassed in a small gas chamber at the concentration camp of Ravensbrück, which was built for female political prisoners, hostages and other “non-racial” prisoners.

No one in Dutch-Paris made an official inquiry about her after the war. If any of the other Dutch-Paris women imprisoned in Ravensbrück knew that they had worked in the same resistance network, she might have told the others about Lydia’s death. But it seems unlikely that any of them would have known. The camp administration separated women by nationality, so she would have had little chance to exchange confidences with the other women who were classified as Dutch or French. There was one courier who may have met her in Brussels and also seen her at Ravensbrück, so maybe she told the tale.

As early as February 1945, before the war ended or any of the political prisoners returned, a Dutch Engelandvaarder submitted an inquiry at the Red Cross. He had spent a couple of weeks hiding at Lydia’s boarding house and had heard that she’d been arrested. He wanted to know if it was possible to send Lydia packages or letters. Did she need food, clothing, money? He wanted to express his thanks for taking care of him when he was on the run.

The Dutchman’s inquiry started the bureaucratic wheels turning to find Lydia. After missing person forms were printed in the newspapers, three other people inquired after Lydia: a Dutch woman living in Brussels; a distant cousin by marriage, and the secretary of the Friends of the Forest of Soignes, to which Lydia belonged.

The Belgian Commissariat for Repatriation pursued the case until the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Central Tracing Bureau informed them on 19 December 1946 that Lydia had died in Ravensbrück on 28 January 1945, cause of death: gassed. The Belgian Ministry of Reconstruction was then able to declare her dead and issue the document that served as a death certificate in the uncertain circumstances of war.