In our last post we left the Polish captain turned resister Wyssogota on a deportation train heading to the concentration camps in the Third Reich in April 1943. Never one to accept a bad situation, our man was among 50 men who jumped from the train on the German side of the Rhine. Although he had been injured by barbed wire along the tracks when he jumped off, two other political prisoners travelled with him as fugitives.

Considering that they were part of a mass escape near the frontier and one of them was injured, they should not have been able to make it home to France. But they did with a lot of help from civilians who were priests, nuns, doctors, a village mayor and one French woman married to a member of the Nazi SD. She got them over the border, but first they spent a night in her house, sleeping under a giant portrait of Hitler. Once in France railway workers helped them get to Paris.

In May 1943 Wyssogota was back in Paris and back organizing an escape line. One of his colleagues, Mme Julien, had been arrested, but she had introduced him to another energetic woman known as Mme Vassias. Wyssogota says that he met members of the British Intelligence Service at Mme Vassias’s apartment and took about a dozen aviators to Spain for them.
It’s at this point that the Polish captain’s resistance efforts cross with Dutch efforts, although not, strictly speaking, Dutch-Paris. Dutch-Paris did not technically exist yet, but the Comite in Brussels that later joined Dutch-Paris was already fully functioning.

The Comité began as a response by Dutch expatriates in Belgium to help Dutch Jews fleeing deportation in 1942. By the middle of 1943 they had also been asked for help by non-Jewish fugitives, particularly Engelandvaarders, or men trying to join the Allies in England. The Comité had many hiding places in Brussels, but they did not have a reliable route to Spain.
Some of the young men in the Comité, however, had Dutch friends in Brussels connected to a young Dutch banker working in Brussels. The banker had a lot of friends asking for help in getting to Spain. A couple of the banker’s friends – who were willing to stay in occupied territory to help others escape – moved to Paris. Paris was an obvious place to organize a route to Spain because at that time all French trains went through the capital city.

These young Dutchmen, whose leader we’ll call Thijs, made contact with Wyssogota through a Dutch expat living in Paris. Wyssogota considered Thijs to be the leader of the Dutch section of Visigoths-Lorraine. The Dutch considered Wyssogota someone they paid a lot of money to take Dutchmen and about a dozen Allied aviators from Paris to Spain. Wyssogota had a sliding scale for fees for passage to Spain. Poles went for free. Everyone else paid extra to cover the Poles’ expenses.

Thijs himself accompanied his fugitives along with Wyssogota south from Paris towards Lourdes, from where the line sent fugitives over the border on foot. In late November 1943 Thijs, Wyssogota, eight Dutchmen and an unknown number of Frenchmen and aviators were arrested together on the train between Toulouse and Lourdes. Within the week the banker in Brussels and a few other colleagues had also been arrested. They were all deported as political prisoners. Thijs died in February 1945 when Allied bombers bombed his concentration camp (which may have been a sub-camp working in a factory). Wyssogota and the banker both survived the concentration camps.