Here’s an example of the sort of confusion about who worked with what resistance group that I’ve been discussing in the last few posts.

On 8 March 2024, The New York Times ran a front page obituary about Josette Molland, a French resister who survived the concentration camps and made a point of sharing her experiences through paintings and talks. The article identifies her as “fabricating false papers and transporting them for the famed Dutch-Paris underground network…”

There is absolutely no question of Ms Molland’s illegal work. She earned every one of those Resistance medals that she is wearing in an accompanying photograph. But she was not, technically, a member of Dutch-Paris. In fact, the chef de reseau of Dutch-Paris was quite adamant in several official documents that she was not part of Dutch-Paris. She is, instead, registered in the official French records at the Service historique de la défense, Bureau Resistance, as a member of two of the largest French Resistance networks: MLN/MUR and Combat. It is hardly surprising that an artist with the skills and interest in forging documents would have worked for more than one resistance group.

If she was an honored member of MLN/MUR and Combat, why did she claim to be part of Dutch-Paris?  As it explains in the article, Molland was a friend and resistance colleague of a young Dutch woman of similar age who was also an art student and who did work as a courier for Dutch-Paris. The two did travel to Amsterdam together in late 1942, rather early in the history of Dutch-Paris. She may well have been arrested as a consequence of the arrest of her Dutch friend in March 1944 as she understood her personal tragedy to be. Without reports on the matter from the German security services, there is no way to tell exactly why she was arrested, unless her interrogator told her why.  If so, there is no report of such an exchange in the archives.

So we have a woman who was a friend of a Dutch-Paris courier and thought that she belonged to the same network as her friend. She also believed that she was arrested and deported to the concentration camps because of her work with Dutch-Paris. At the same time, the leader of Dutch-Paris categorically denies that this woman was part of Dutch-Paris. The available archives don’t clear the matter up. That’s why I listed Josette Molland as an ally of Dutch-Paris in the appendix to The Escape Line.

Why does the NYT article associate Ms Molland with Dutch-Paris? Is it because she herself did because that is how she explained the trauma of arrest, torture and deportation to the concentration camps to herself? Is it because Dutch-Paris is “famed” among American readers to a greater degree than MUR/MLN or Combat?  In the end, does it actually matter?