I recently had a wonderful conversation with a Dutch woman and her mother. They’re trying to piece together the story of their father/grandfather. He was arrested on the Franco-Swiss border in 1942 and executed shortly thereafter.

The family has some letters that the Engelandvaarder wrote from prison. They also have some information from the man’s brother-in-law, who was also arrested on the Swiss border but was not executed because he was only 17 years old. And they have the name of a third underage Engelandvaarder who was part of the group. They believe they have a name (probably an alias) of a man who betrayed them on the border.

That’s actually quite a lot to start with, as long as you keep in mind that the memories of a 17-year-old from his time in prison are going to be restricted to what he alone experienced. But they have names, dates and locations. From there they can look up bureaucratic records and post-war reports. It’s enough to build on.
So far my new friends have come across two things that I’d like to share with you.

First, they got a name of a passeur from a French website. It’s a good and trustworthy website. Nevertheless, if you read the one page article on the father/grandfather on that website carefully, you’ll notice that the author made an assumption that doesn’t hold up. The author assumed that if French passeur X helped a few Englishmen in 1942 he must have also helped these Dutchmen in 1942. I have no doubt that the French passeur helped Englishmen and was executed at the military prison in Dijon. But I have no reason to think that he also helped the Dutchman who was also executed at the military prison in Dijon. The Wehrmacht was meticulous in their record keeping, but they had a long list of people to execute. They didn’t waste a spot on the firing range just to make sure they didn’t execute strangers at the same time. Also, passeurs weren’t running tour groups. There’s no reason to think that a Dutchman had access to the same clandestine network as an Englishman.

My point here is that you need to read anything on the internet carefully and with a certain amount of skepticism. You should take the same attitude toward books, but at least books have footnotes to back up their claims. And if it’s a book published by an academic press, it’s been reviewed by at least one other scholar in the field.

Second, my friends drove down to France to visit the village where their father/grandfather was arrested and then went to Dijon to try to see the prison. The prison was not opened to visitors. But just by chance they saw a poster for an exhibit about resistance in Dijon. It turned out to be just up the street at the local archives and it had a mock up of the sort of prison cell that their father/grandfather would have been in. Plus, the archivist was very enthusiastic and promised to look for documents for them. The moral of this story is: do not ignore the local archives and libraries. And do not hesitate to tell the archivists and librarians what you are looking for.