In the past couple of posts we’ve talked about the families involved in Dutch-Paris. Some made it through the war without arrests but others were not so lucky. What happened to the children while the parents were prisoners?

The documents do not go into detail about how the children navigated the last 15 months of the war after their parents were arrested, but they do give some hints.

The nine and eleven year old daughters of the French customs official on the Swiss border who was arrested by mysterious police were taken in by a neighbor after their mother was arrested in March 1944. They returned to their mother’s care after she was liberated from prison in August 1944.

Three Dutch-Paris families were disrupted by arrests in Paris. In one family both parents were arrested and then deported to the concentration camps. The oldest child, a daughter, was old enough to work. She had one or two younger brothers. Their parents’ employer allowed them to stay in their apartment while their parents were gone and gave them money.

Everyone in the second family in Paris, including the nine year old daughter, spent two nights in a French jail. The French police turned the father over to the Germans but let the others go. They returned to their apartment, under surveillance. Two months later, the mother died of a heart attack during a bombing raid. That left the 16 year old twins and their sister alone in Paris for the last year of the war. It is not clear how they managed to survive, although leaders of Dutch-Paris who evaded arrest did take cash to them. They also helped the three orphans to resettle after the war.

In the third family, the father and teenage son were arrested, but the mother and young daughter were not. Dutch-Paris offered to take the mother and girl to Switzerland, but the mother felt that she was too pregnant to make the journey. Dutch-Paris made sure she had cash. Dutch-Paris also hired a lawyer to get the boy out of prison. The lawyer succeeded in making a deal because he was under 16. The Germans agreed to let him go as long as he returned to family in the Netherlands. He did so, but disappeared in the spring of 1945. The father returned from the concentration camps that summer to be reunited with his wife and two daughters. They continued to look for their missing son into the 1960s.

Those are the bare facts as related by the documents. Surely, there is much more to each story. But they all boil down to one thing. The children of resisters had to rely on the kindness of others. Just as the people Dutch-Paris rescued had to rely on the kindness of strangers for their own survival.