War does not spare children. They are injured, maimed and killed by bullets, missiles and shrapnel. They spend anxious nights in underground shelters while their homes are bombed. They go hungry. They are orphaned. During the Second World War the Nazis deliberately murdered children alongside their parents as part of their crazed plans of social engineering.

War also asks parents to make impossible choices. The most extreme example from the Second World War is the Jewish parents who had to decide whether they should take their children with them for “relocation to the east” – which turned out to be mass murder in the extermination camps – or leave their children with strangers.

Many parents faced less extreme but still difficult ethical choices. How far can you go to get food for your children? Is illegal trading on the black market justifiable if the food is for your children? Is it ok to date an enemy soldier if your husband’s been in a POW camp for three years and you can’t make enough money to buy enough food for your child? What about collaborating with the enemy if it protects your children?

On the other side of the same coin, is it ok to join the resistance if it will endanger your children? Because the Nazis used children to make their resister parents talk. In fact, Dutch-Paris smuggled the children of two resistance families into Switzerland so that the children could not be used as hostages.

And in February 1944 the Germans arrested a 14 year old boy along with his father, a local leader of Dutch-Paris. The Germans tortured the father in front of the boy. But the father had expected that something like that would happen and had told his son not to talk no matter what. The father survived the war and wrote in his report that “like a hero” his son did not buckle under that psychological pressure. But the son did not survive the war.

Every parent of children still young enough to live at home who joined Dutch-Paris did so at the peril of those children. That took extraordinary courage.