Searching for the Dutch-Paris Escape Line
Most of the men and women who rescued others as part of Dutch-Paris were either unmarried or old enough that their children had already left home. But there were men and women who had the courage to join even though they had young children.
Sometimes it turned out alright. For example, a Jewish couple walked out of Amsterdam in 1943, pushing their baby in a stroller. They took refuge in Brussels and worked full time supporting other Jewish people in hiding as part of the Comite. But first they found a good foster home for their baby, now a toddler. They did not want the Germans to find him if they were arrested. Nor did they want their son to grow up in a world run by Nazis.
Also in Brussels, the father of seven children at home joined the Comite. He was extremely active in finding creative ways to fund the rescue efforts and even allowed fugitives to stay at the family home. In this case, his wife clearly shared in his commitment to resistance, although she does not figure in the lists of network members.
Both of those families made it through the war without anyone being arrested. But other families in the line were not so lucky.
On the French side of the Swiss border, a customs agent and his wife actively assisted Dutch-Paris with smuggling documents and people over the border. They opened their home to fugitives on more than one occasion. But the father was shot and arrested by plainclothes police in the spring of 1944. To this day no one has been able to identify exactly who these agents were or what unit they belonged to. He never returned. The mother was arrested in March 1944 when delivering illegal documents. She was liberated from a German prison in August 1944 but was rumored to have suffered from a nervous breakdown.
In Paris an entire family – mother, father, 16 year old twins and 9 year old daughter – spent two nights in a French prison. The family was released, except for the father. He was turned over to the Germans and died in a concentration camp in February 1945. The mother died during a bombing raid in April 1944.
The parents of another family in Paris were both arrested and deported to the concentration camps. The father died there although the mother returned in the summer of 1945.
And, of course, there was the father who was arrested with his 14 year old son in Paris. The mother, who was pregnant, and young daughter of the family escaped arrest because they were staying at a different hiding place than the father and son.
These parent resisters knew the sort of risks that they were taking for themselves and for their children. But for them it was much worse to allow the Nazis to implement the hate-filled society of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich.
War does not spare children. They are injured, maimed and killed by bullets, missiles and shrapnel. They spend anxious nights in underground shelters while their homes are bombed. They go hungry. They are orphaned. During the Second World War the Nazis deliberately murdered children alongside their parents as part of their crazed plans of social engineering.
War also asks parents to make impossible choices. The most extreme example from the Second World War is the Jewish parents who had to decide whether they should take their children with them for “relocation to the east” – which turned out to be mass murder in the extermination camps – or leave their children with strangers.
Many parents faced less extreme but still difficult ethical choices. How far can you go to get food for your children? Is illegal trading on the black market justifiable if the food is for your children? Is it ok to date an enemy soldier if your husband’s been in a POW camp for three years and you can’t make enough money to buy enough food for your child? What about collaborating with the enemy if it protects your children?
On the other side of the same coin, is it ok to join the resistance if it will endanger your children? Because the Nazis used children to make their resister parents talk. In fact, Dutch-Paris smuggled the children of two resistance families into Switzerland so that the children could not be used as hostages.
And in February 1944 the Germans arrested a 14 year old boy along with his father, a local leader of Dutch-Paris. The Germans tortured the father in front of the boy. But the father had expected that something like that would happen and had told his son not to talk no matter what. The father survived the war and wrote in his report that “like a hero” his son did not buckle under that psychological pressure. But the son did not survive the war.
Every parent of children still young enough to live at home who joined Dutch-Paris did so at the peril of those children. That took extraordinary courage.
Good news for all of you who are researching Engelandvaarders*. In conjunction with the Engelandvaardersmuseum and the Netwerk Oorlogsbronnen, the Nationaal Archief in Den Haag is working on a project to digitize their documents about Engelandvaarders and create an online map of the routes that Engelandvaarders used. The goal is to make it possible to reconstruct any particular Engelandvaarder’s journey with a few clicks of the mouse. It should be up and running by the end of next year. For more information and who to contact, check out the project’s page https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/de-engelandvaarders-in-kaart-brengen.
Any foreign national who arrived in the United Kingdom during the war was interned at the Royal Patriotic School and interrogated by the British about who they were and how they got out of Occupied Europe. The British were, of course, looking for German spies trying to pass themselves off as Dutch or French or Czech or anything else. They did find a few, and executed them.
Not surprisingly, the Dutch authorities in London also Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s another story that turns on luck, sent to me by the son of an Engelandvaarder.
This is a Dutch-Paris story in a very roundabout way. The Engelandvaarder, whom we’ll call Jack, made it to Spain with the help of Dutch-Paris. He then trained with the Dutch Bureau Inlichtingen (Information Bureau) and ended up working with the British and American units who identified civilians who had helped Allied aviators as well as hunting down traitors. The American aviator in this story worked for the American MIS-X bureau in Holland and so with Jack.
The American aviator, who we’ll call Frank, was the navigator on a B-24 that was shot up on a bombing raid over Berlin on 29 April 1944. The crew bailed out over eastern Netherlands. Frank was taken up by the Dutch resistance, which moved him from hiding place to hiding place until he reached an apartment in Amsterdam in Fall 1944.
One day when he was in the shower, Frank sang Read the rest of this entry »
The last two posts described episodes in the history of Dutch-Paris in which a stranger on the street acted spontaneously in a way that helped or hindered someone associated with Dutch-Paris. The Engelandvaarder in one of those stories assured me that he’d benefited from good luck and that luck played an important role in everyone’s life during the war.
If you don’t like the idea of luck, you can also call it being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time. There are plenty of examples of that as well in the history of Dutch-Paris.
Here’s a very unfortunate example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When the Gestapo, Abwehr and other German police decided to make their move against Dutch-Paris in February 1944 they did so in a coordinated series of arrests in Paris, Lyon, Annecy and Brussels. They had a list of people to arrest at certain addresses.
One of those names was the Dutch consul in Lyon, an insurance agent. The Gestapo arrived at Read the rest of this entry »
In my last post I described a seemingly random occurrence, apparently meant as a gesture of goodwill, that had disastrous consequences for the men and women of Dutch-Paris and those they were helping. A random passerby saw a courier drop a notebook and returned it to her in front of the policemen who had arrested her.
Random interventions by passersby, however, did not always have unfortunate consequences. They might also save a person, as happened in another Dutch-Paris story.
A young Dutchman, an Engelandvaarder, was arrested in Paris but jumped out of the Wehrmacht car taking him to Gestapo HQ and ran off into the streets of Paris. He found himself on a busy shopping street with police whistles going off all around. Where to go? What to do?
An older lady who happened to be on the street for some errand of her own saw the young man and Read the rest of this entry »
An Engelandvaarder with whom I had the great honor and pleasure to correspond, told me that luck played a crucial role in his escape from the Nazis. You may or may not believe in luck, but there are at least two instances of the history of Dutch-Paris hinging on the actions of passersby that I know of. Their effects were both negative and positive.
Here’s an example of a negative consequence.
In early February 1944, French collaborationist police arrested a young Dutch-Paris courier at a café in Paris on the grounds that she “looked Jewish” (she was not) and that she had a bag of food with her. The food was meant for aviators to eat as they crossed the Pyrenees but just as easily could have been part of a black market trade.
The police agents obliged the courier to go with them to the police station. As they walked along the sidewalk, the courier tossed a small notebook out of her pocket. A passerby politely called her attention to it and returned the notebook. Of course the police immediately Read the rest of this entry »
In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let us remember the horror and inhumanity of the “Final Solution.” But let us also remember the glimmers of humanity offered by those men and women who volunteered to help Jews escape the Nazis despite the risk to themselves.
Let us also remember the men and women of Dutch-Paris who died as political prisoners in concentration camps – or shortly after being liberated because of maltreatment in the camps – because they belonged to a resistance network that sheltered Jews from the Nazis.
Brantsen, Jacob KJ (Dutch)
De Wit, Michiel (Belgian)
Caubo, Jean-Michael (Dutch)
Charroin, Arthur (French)
Dupont, Nicolas (French)
Israel, Philip (Dutch)
Kolkman, Joseph (Dutch)
Meriot, Raymond (French)
Meunier, Marie (French)
Meyer, Paul (Swiss)
Mincowski, Leo (Romanian)
Mohr, Josephus J (Dutch)
Nijkerk, Benjamin (Dutch)
Ogy, Lydia (Belgian)
Piveteau, Gabriel (French)
Prilliez, Emile (French)
Ruys, John (Dutch)
Tester, Josephus (Dutch)
Van Haaften, Adriaan (Dutch)
Weidner, Gabrielle (Dutch)
This is a partial list of resisters connected to Dutch-Paris who are known to have died in the concentration camps. Others were killed in ambush or trying to escape or in prison in Belgian. It does not include the names of fugitives who were captured while Dutch-Paris was trying to help them, but only because the information is not known.
Civilians under Nazi occupation made a point of studying the Germans who were controlling their lives. One of the things that comes up repeatedly in reports, memoirs and diaries is that the Nazis were terrified of illness. Well, they didn’t mind at all if millions of men and women under their control in prisons and concentration camps died of disease. But they were terrified of getting sick themselves.
This was so universally well-established that resisters used the threat of illness to protect themselves on many occasions. In February 1944, for example, the SS shot every prisoner who could not stumble out on a death march before the Russians arrived at a sub-camp of the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück. Every prisoner, that is, except for the women in one particular ward of what they called an infirmary. A young woman who belonged to Dutch-Paris was lying on a bunk bed in that room. A Polish prisoner in that ward had the courage and presence of mind to tell the SS that the women in the room had typhus. Just the word “typhus” scared the SS so deeply Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s an explanation for those of you who read the last post and thought: “Ha! How can she say a tire could go for 4 or 5 American dollars? They didn’t use American dollars in occupied Europe.” You’re right. No German occupation authority would recognize an American dollar as legal tender. (At least not officially, I can’t say when it comes to bribes.) You could not plunk down a couple of dollars at a ticket booth in the Gare du Nord and ask for a round-trip berth to Toulouse without having to answer some awkward questions posed by the police.
But we’ve already established that the economy was not functioning according to the usual rules of legal tender. If you happened to have some American dollars saved from a pre-war trip or perhaps from a letter sent by a relative, you could find ways to spend them on the clandestine markets. After all, after the German defeat at Stalingrad more and more people were willing to bet on the Allies winning the war. In fact, Jean Weidner had a whole pocketful of international money with him on a trip into Switzerland in 1943, including American dollars and British pounds sterling. He or his resistance colleagues had agreed to exchange the “enemy” currency for the local currency in either France or Belgian as a way of helping fugitives escape through a place where everything had to be paid for in cash. (The Swiss confiscated all his money but later returned it after considerable paperwork.)
Most people, of course, did not have American or British money sitting around. And many of them, such as the wives of French POWs who had been sitting in POW camps since 1940, were short on French francs as well.
It’s no wonder then that some French women collected their tobacco ration not because they smoked but because they needed it to buy food. A cigarette was a known quantity that everyone could agree on. If the seller accepted cigarettes in payment, he or she did not have to worry about exchange rates or currency devaluations. Cigarettes would not lose value and could be traded for another item. France never reached the state of economic disintegration in which cigarettes replaced money as Germany did in 1945. But a Dutch-Paris courier bought a carton of cigarettes to buy and bribe his was across the country in the tumultuous summer of 1944. He recorded the purchase in his expense account although he did not itemize how he spent the cigarettes.
Given all this – the fragmentation of the economy into very local markets, the loss of confidence in the government and its rationing and currency, the prevalence of an array of alternative methods of trading and payment (barter, black market, gray market) – it’s extremely difficult to convert 1943 prices into 2021 dollars. Or even 1943 dollars for that matter. But I wonder how useful that would even be. That world of rationing, shortages and barter was so very different from our own world of credit cards and online shopping. Isn’t it enough to understand the daily circumstances of finding food, heating and clothing to appreciate how difficult the occupation was for all citizens whether or not they were with the resistance?