If you followed the footnotes in The Escape Line or looked at the appendices, you’ll know that I went to 31 archives in seven countries to reconstruct the history of Dutch-Paris. I would have gone to a few more if I had had the time and money. If you’ve read the last three posts, you’ll have an appreciation for the range of archives that hold documents about resisters.
All of that is to say that the documents about resisters are as hidden and disbursed as their subject matter. Just like you couldn’t go up to a Resistance Recruiting center to sign up during the war, you can’t go to a single Resistance archive anywhere to find out what happened. Resisters had to be creative and flexible to lead their double lives under occupation. You have to also be creative and flexible to find what traces they left behind.

In the 1980’s it seemed self-evident that there were no documents about resistance because it would have been suicidal for resisters to write anything down. So the only histories of resistance were either oral histories or, essentially, memoirs. But that self-evident truth was wrong. There were documents. It was just that in the 1980’s those documents were in the filing cabinets of active bureaucracies or shut away by special laws, privacy laws and the opinions of certain (but not all) archivists guarding their fiefdoms. It would have taken a lifetime and some impressive personal influence to track Dutch-Paris through all its hidey-holes then. Fortunately changes in laws and personnel have since opened up many archives.

There is, however, one obstacle to finding out the entire story that will never change no matter how much time passes or how the privacy laws alter. Many resisters never talked or wrote about the war. Many of them did not survive the war, of course, so what they knew and saw died with them. But many of the survivors remained silent. They did not fill out questionnaires in 1944. They did not apply for pensions. They did not give interviews. They did not write their memoirs even for family use. They did what they felt needed to be done during the war and after the war were intent on only the present or the future.

A few broke that silence in the 1980’s and 90’s when they had had their families and careers and were alarmed by the rise of neo-Nazism and Holocaust denial. They may have spoken at schools or contributed to anthologies. But others remained staunchly silent.

Such resisters will not appear in any documents. In which case, you might have to reconstruct that person’s story in mirror image from mentions in the documents written by or about his or her colleagues. Or you might have to respect that resister’s silence with your own.