We’ve been talking about how resistance lines, especially escape lines, were vulnerable because they had to trust strangers and were always in need of more help and more resources. Resisters knew this. They knew that they literally put their lives in someone else’s hands when they trusted them with their identity. But in a clandestine organization their only choice was to trust their guts about the character of strangers or to rely on referrals from people they did know.

The leaders of Dutch-Paris happened to be remarkably good judges of other people’s characters. They had serious doubts about some of the men who were later revealed to be working for the Germans and refused to work with them. They created very good security measures and followed them. But they had a problem unique to rescue organizations. Dutch-Paris existed to help the persecuted. Not just the persecuted whom they personally knew but the persecuted of any nation or faith.

As a clandestine organization they had to rely on the persecuted to find them. For the most part fugitives found Dutch-Paris through rumors or referrals. A lot of those came through the Dutch consul in Lyon whose office was flooded with desperate Dutch refugees and who had contacts in the prisons and courts in Lyon.

How did that work? Sometimes the consul decided that a certain refugee or family seemed like the kind of people who could make it into Switzerland and introduced them to the leaders of Dutch-Paris. Sometimes the consul let the leaders know that someone was in the prison in Annecy. The leader and his wife went to visit them with food and got to know them. After the fugitives served their one month prison sentence they could ask for help getting into Switzerland. The leaders would know them well enough to trust them or not.

Or the fugitive had an address of some connection in Brussels or Lyon and that connection turned out to be in Dutch-Paris. Two young Jewish men who escaped from a train heading to Auschwitz had the name and address of a school friend of one of their fathers who lived in Brussels. After jumping out of the train the two made their way to that address. The family was involved in the Comité and the two young men ended up staying in Brussels and working with the Comité to rescue others.

Presuming on such slender connections was a risk for both the fugitive and for the rescuer. But resistance was nothing if not risky.