I was honored to be invited to a zoom talk given by the daughter and niece of Dutch-Paris resisters about her mother’s adventurous escape from the Nazis during the war and her postwar work to help the children of victims of the Holocaust.  I can highly recommend her book about it, Motherland by Rita Goldberg.

It’s worth remembering that Dutch-Paris began as illegal opposition to the Holocaust.  The men and women of Dutch-Paris did not show their disgust with Nazi racism or their support of their Jewish neighbors by marching in the streets or signing petitions.  That would have been foolhardy in the extreme given that they were living under German occupation.  The situation had also gone far beyond the stage where political actions were helpful or even possible.  No, they took a quieter, clandestine, but no less dangerous route to resist Nazi racism by helping its victims to survive.

The component groups of Dutch-Paris in Brussels, Paris and Lyon all began in 1942 in order to help Jews get away from the Nazis to neutral Switzerland.   All the processes and infrastructure that they later used to help other fugitives, the resisters first developed to hide Jews and/or get them across borders.  Rushing against the clock of round-ups and deportations, the men and women of Dutch-Paris figured out how to find hiding places, purchase black market food, obtain false documents and avoid patrols on the streets and public transportation.

Dutch-Paris also relied on the dedication and courage of a number of Jewish men and women who joined the network rather than go into hiding or take refuge in Switzerland.  They lived with an additional level of fear – that of being exposed as both Jews and resisters, meaning double enemies of the Nazis.

So Dutch-Paris found their first “clients” and many dedicated colleagues among the Jews being persecuted by the Nazis.  But Nazism was a voracious machine of hatred and did not limit its persecutions to Jews.  By the end of the war Dutch-Paris had also helped Engelandvaarders, labor draft evaders, resisters on the run and downed Allied aviators.  They continued to help Jews, even ransoming three Jewish men out of a French internment camp a matter of weeks before the liberation.   But they helped anyone persecuted by the Nazis.  In true opposition to Nazi ideology’s division of human beings into competing groups, Dutch-Paris saw only human beings in need.