A history book about an event in living memory is never finished. Sure, the historian can spend years reading thousands of documents in over 30 archives, but there will still be details that aren’t in the documents. This is especially true in the case of Dutch-Paris because it was a clandestine network spread over half a continent and some of the people involved died before they could file a report on their activities. The book itself will bring new details to light, although they may turn out to be not entirely accurate.

Here’s an example. A couple of weeks ago I received a message from an Engelandvaarder friend in Tasmania who journeyed from Paris to Spain via Dutch-Paris when he was a young man in 1944. Rudy regretted to inform me that I had made an error on a particular page of The Escape Line regarding the escape of the Dutch statesman GJ van Heuven Goedhart. Rudy wanted to know where I had gotten my information because he has a very clear memory of talking to Van Heuven Goedhart’s three Engelandvaarder companions at a hotel in Llerida, Spain, on a date that I claim the man was still in France.

I have the utmost respect for Rudy’s memory in these matters and have benefited tremendously from his unpublished memoirs and his help. But the information in the book comes from Van Heuven Goedhart’s own book, his sworn testimony before a Dutch parliamentary committee, and a whole lot of reports written about it at the time. The Dutch government in exile was very anxious about his safe escape from occupied Europe.

Rudy himself immediately understood what had happened. He remembers talking to the three other Dutchmen who had been with Van Heuven Goedhart in Toulouse. They told him that they had come with the famous man, but that he was staying in his hotel room to be safe. Rudy never saw the man, but the other three did a thorough job of convincing him, the other Dutchmen and probably everyone else in that hotel bar that Van Heuven Goedhart had already reached Spain. Meanwhile, the man himself had been abandoned by guides – who did not belong to Dutch-Paris – in the Pyrenees and was making his own way through the mountains. Had the Germans known that, he might not have made it to Spain.

As Rudy concluded, the other three Engelandvaarders had obviously been told to spread the rumor that Van Heuven Goedhart was already in Spain and did so well enough that it was still effective 74 years later. I wish I’d known that interesting little fact before the book went to print. It doesn’t change the facts of the story, but it adds a little more depth to it.