How to Flee the Gestapo

Sometimes all it takes to save a life is for another person to act forcefully on their behalf.

Here’s a Dutch-Paris story that I only recently learned from the grandchild of the man concerned.  The man’s great-grandchild was doing a little family research and asked me a question, which led to me asking them quite a lot more questions.

In 1942 the French police rounded up most Jews in Paris for deportation to Auschwitz.   During that time, a 12 year old girl went to visit her best friend.  The concierge of her friend’s building told the girl that her friend’s family had been arrested for being Jewish and that her friend and her brother were at an orphanage of sorts awaiting deportation.

The girl went to this orphanage and demanded to see her friend.  But the people in charge would not deal with a child.  So the girl went Read the rest of this entry »

I am equally pleased to let you know of the publication of another book involving Dutch-Paris: Luck through Adversity: The Memoir of a Dutchman’s Flight to Freedom through the Dutch-Paris Escape Line of World War II by Pieter Rudolph Zeeman.

Any of you familiar with the story of Dutch-Paris will remember Rudy Zeeman as the young Dutchman with the guts to open the back door of the Wehrmacht car taking him to Gestapo HQ in Paris; roll out onto the sidewalk, and run into the night. If you’ve looked through The Escape Line or Gewone Helden, you’ve seen some of his photographs from his Engelandvaart from Amsterdam to Spain.

But those are only the highlights. The full story comes alive in his memoir that he researched and wrote over many years. Rudy took the time to ask for and include his companion’s stories from his trek.  Some of those companions were Dutch; others were downed Allied aviators from across the US.  He went back to the Pyrenees after the war to look at the places he walked across and talk to people who had helped him years earlier. He remained friends with some of them and very generously shared what he had found out about Dutch-Paris with me when I was doing my research.

Zeeman himself painted the cover of his book. He has similar oil paintings of his trek in the museum of the Chemin de la Liberte in St-Girons, France, and in the Engelandvaarders Museum in the Netherlands.

This is a gripping true story of adventure, danger, quick thinking, endurance and friendship. It takes you right into the thick of what it felt like to escape across Occupied Europe with the Nazis on your heels.

ISBN: 978-1734699913

I’m tremendously pleased to let you know about the recent publication of The Weidners in Wartime: Letters of Daily Survival and Heroism under Nazi Rule by Janet Holmes Carper. Janet and I have become friends through our overlapping research and she has been more than generous with her help. In fact, it’s possible that it was the excellence of her French translations of my letters that got me into an archive or two.

Janet Carper has spent years compiling, translating and contextualizing the wartime letters correspondence of the Weidner Family. As the leader of Dutch-Paris, Jean Weidner was based in Lyon during the war although he travelled frequently and shifted his base to Switzerland. His sister Gabrielle lived in Paris, where she was also involved in Dutch-Paris. Their parents and younger sister Annette lived in The Hague. Just staying in touch across so many different occupation zones posed serious challenges. The family had to develop their own code because the regular mail was curtailed and censored. Even when they found messengers to deliver their mail personally, they felt a pressing need to be discreet.

The family needed discretion because of Jean and Gabrielle’s involvement in rescuing fugitives, of course, but also because “Papa” Weidner was up to something shady as well. It was probably the garden variety shadiness of Dutch civilians under Occupation, but it still landed him in jail. So much of the letters deal with the ever day difficulties and inconveniences of living under occupation. But the Weidners were Seventh-day Adventists, meaning they were vegetarians. Their dietary restrictions complicated the already intricate negotiations for food that everyone went through. So the family discusses not only how to find enough nutrients but also the moral arguments for and against eating meat under the circumstances.

Carper has done a superb job of teasing out the hidden meanings between the lines to show us what living under Nazi occupation was really like day in and day out. Anyone who’s wanted more psychological depth to the story of Dutch-Paris will find it here in the correspondence of siblings and parents separated by war at a time when they needed each other’s support the most.

ISBN: 978-1-7346999-0-6

The Return of political prisoners, prisoners of war and forced laborers from Germany to France, Belgium and the Netherlands had slowed to a trickle by August 1945.   If someone had not yet come home or at least gotten a message to his or her family by then, it was unlikely that they ever would.

And yet the families and loved ones kept hoping.  Dutch-Paris had several prisoners still missing at the end of that summer.   One Dutch-Paris leader put an advertisement in the newspaper asking for any information about his sister.  He received two letters in response from women who had been prisoners at Ravensbruck with her and could tell him about her final days.

Other families made an endless round of the Red Cross and the social ministries and every other organization they could think of that might have contacts in Germany who might have information.   One Belgian family filled out endless forms searching for a missing person and made personal inquiries among returned political prisoners.  They had almost reconciled themselves to their prisoner’s death in late 1945 when the Belgian foreign office told them that the Soviets reported that they had the man and were exchanging him for a Soviet citizen.   How happy the family was as they prepared to welcome home their husband and brother.   But he didn’t arrive and he didn’t arrive.   Finally, months and months later, the Soviets said they had made a spelling error.  They knew nothing about the missing man.   The family had to accept that the story another prisoner had told them about the missing man being in a factory that was bombed into rubble in the last weeks of the war must be true.

The uncertainty about the fate of missing persons had practical as well as psychological ramifications.   If you could not prove that a person had died, you could not get a death certificate.  Without a death certificate, property could not be sold, nor could benefits be collected.   Surviving families were cast into destitution.  This was such a common and pressing problem in the Netherlands that the Dutch parliament changed the laws regarding the issuance of death certificates in cases of displaced persons.

In the case of Dutch-Paris, the lack of a father’s death certificate left his children without means or a legal guardian.   It took a great deal of official correspondence and bureaucratic dealings to straighten out the children’s legal situation on the part of both their uncle and the official leader of Dutch-Paris.  Fortunately they had adults to advocate for them.   The Netherlands still has over 500 names on its list of missing persons from WWII.

Another effect of The Return of prisoners and forced laborers to France in the summer of 1945 that we’ve been talking about for the last few posts was a resurgence of what’s sometimes called the “extra-legal purge.”

During the occupation, civilians who collaborated with the Germans had increased access to power, influence and material goods such as food. Collaborators had various reasons for working with the enemy. Some did so out of pure self-interest. Others felt that they were in a sense protecting their community from the hard reality of life. Some just agreed with Nazism and its vision of society. They all attracted the envy and contempt of their neighbors. Everyone expected that if the Germans lost the war, their collaborators would be held to account for what many considered to be treason.

The purge of collaborators took different forms with different levels of effectiveness in different countries. In France Charles de Gaulle’s postwar government very much wanted to funnel the passions swirling around collaboration into the regular court system and keep it under the control of the central government in Paris.

Many citizens had other ideas about that. Most famously, in some places, resisters rounded up the local women known to have Read the rest of this entry »

There is no doubt that every former prisoner was happy to return home from the Third Reich in 1945. But those returns often held their own traumas.

To begin with, it’s fair to assume that every displaced person who returned from Germany was in poor health. Some of them were so desperately ill that they never fully recovered and died young even if they struggled on for some years. But even those who had been arrested late in the war and spent a relatively short time in captivity were weak from malnutrition and exposure. The concept of post-traumatic stress disorder had not yet been developed, but it’s fair to assume that every returnee suffered from it to one degree or another.
Jewish survivors faced particular challenges of returning to families and neighborhoods that had been decimated. They sometimes even found themselves unwelcome in their own homes by the people who had benefited from anti-Semitic policies by moving into their homes.

Less well known, many political prisoners faces similar problems. Although in most cases political prisoners did not lose their entire families, they did sometimes lose their closest friends and colleagues. A Dutch-Paris courier whom we’ll call Read the rest of this entry »

When they liberated the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, horrified British soldiers buried the dead and tried to save the living. They also required that the German adults who lived near the camp come into the camp to see what had happened there. And they filmed what they saw. That film was made into a newsreel and distributed to cinemas in western Europe.

The documentary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen showed at a movie theater in a small town in eastern France about 75 years ago this week. By June 1945 the French were beginning to understand the depth of mistreatment that prisoners and slave laborers had endured in Nazi Germany. Huge crowds gathered at train stations whenever a train with deportees returning home was expected to arrive. The crowds could see how skeletal and weak those returnees were. Rumors spread as the family of returned prisoners talked about how sick their loved ones were. The crowds could also see that many of the people they expected to return home were not returning home.

One night that the documentary showed Read the rest of this entry »

The collapse of the Third Reich and the end of the Second World War 75 years ago was met with general rejoicing, but it also represented a threat of a global pandemic. The Nazis had forcibly displaced millions of people from their homes across Europe and brought them into central Europe as prisoners and/or laborers of varying degrees of freedom (mostly none). Most of them lived in appalling conditions without adequate nutrition, shelter or sanitation. The sick did not receive anything close to adequate medical care. Diseases like typhus ran rampant among the displaced population.

But of course none of them wanted to stay in their prisons and labor camps once the Allies arrived. They wanted to go home if they could. At the least they wanted to get out of the rubble of bombed out cities to someplace with food. Each one of those millions of displaced persons who left their prison or labor camp was a possible carrier of disease.

So why wasn’t there a pandemic in 1945? It didn’t happen in large part because the Allied authorities had not forgotten the Spanish Flu that followed the First World War and killed many more people than the war itself did. The Allies knew about the prison and labor camps, although they could not begin to imagine exactly how bad it was in them.  They came prepared.

When the Allies liberated a camp they buried the dead, gave medical care to the dangerously ill, and fed and deloused those who could walk on their own. They actually dusted former prisoners with DDT powder, which makes us cringe now, but it did kill disease-bearing insects and did help prevent a pandemic. For example, a man who worked with Dutch-Paris in Paris was liberated from a concentration camp directly into an American field hospital. Unfortunately he died there a couple of weeks later, because he was already too ill to be saved when the Americans liberated the camp.

The Allies also burned down all the buildings in places like Bergen-Belsen to kill the fleas, lice and animals that can carry typhus. They also tried to keep infected people from spreading out over the countryside by setting up refugee camps with beds, food, clothes, clean water and officials who processed applications for transportation home. In the West, many displaced persons were flown to their home countries on military planes. Others traveled by military trucks. Once they returned to their home countries, they were again screened for public health issues. The sick were given a place in a rest home or hospital to recover before continuing their journeys.

Although it’s not something you hear about, the fact that there was not a pandemic in 1945 is a triumph of public health policy, planning and action.

I had a surprising conversation with my 14 year-old son about the book he’s reading for school: Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. The most interesting part went like this:
My son : “Romeo was the bad guy.”
Me : “What?”
My son : “He murdered two people and then he killed himself, so….” (shrug).

All the times that I’ve read that play or seen it performed in its many variations, I have never thought of Romeo as the bad guy. But when you put it like my son did, I can see his point.
Dutch-Paris is open to a similarly broad range of interpretations. The prevailing opinion among Read the rest of this entry »

Weeks ago, at the beginning of the stay at home orders meant to slow the Coronavirus, an American friend forwarded a message from a Hungarian friend who was living in Switzerland. It was a poster featuring a black and white photograph of a soldier standing in the rising mist next to a small guard house. The words, in English, read “Your grandfather was asked to go to war, you’re being asked to sit on the couch.” It also had the address of a Dutch website encouraging the Dutch people to stand together against Coronavirus.

I’ve asked several historian colleagues if they recognize the photograph or the uniform worn by the soldier, but no one does. So the facts about the provenance of this poster are sketchy, but its message remains powerful.

When I first saw the image and thought that it was Swiss, I immediately thought that the analogy failed because Read the rest of this entry »