Here’s another good question from the chat section of my WW2TV talk about Dutch-Paris. How did the resisters in Dutch-Paris who came from the Netherlands, Belgium and France and the people they helped, who came from even more countries, talk to each other? Were they all linguists?

This is one of the many interesting things about Dutch-Paris: the line operated in four languages (and more currencies). Were they all polyglots? No, but a lot of them did speak more than one language.

Some people in the line didn’t need to speak more than one language. That would be anyone in a support role who didn’t interact directly with the fugitives the line was helping, such as people providing black market food or even lodging.

The people who were more likely to need to speak more than one language were the leaders, who travelled extensively, and the guides and couriers, who either crossed borders and/or spoke with fugitives. But not always. If there was even one guide in a group who spoke English, that was enough. That person did all the talking with aviators. The rest did the talking with everyone else they encountered on the journey.

The people who spoke more than one language in Dutch-Paris seem to have already known those languages before the war either because of where they lived or what they did. Many people in Belgium, for instance, could get by in Dutch and French. Many Dutch students and business people learned more than one language in school. Pastors often spoke more than one language. One of the women in Paris spoke several languages because her husband had been a military attache, necessitating that they live in several countries.

Dutch, French and English weren’t really a problem for Dutch-Paris. But there were occasions on which they helped Jewish refugees from eastern Europe with whom they did not share a common language. In that case, they used gestures and facial expressions and hoped that the strangers they were helping had the imagination and common sense to figure it out. If a family made it all the way from eastern Europe, often through the Netherlands than down through Belgium and northern France to southern France, chances were pretty high that they were resourceful and observant enough to figure out what needed to be done and what someone was trying to tell them. To some degree, danger makes us all linguists.