Following the last post about the Swiss border, here’s a story about some Dutch Jews who Dutch-Paris helped get into Switzerland. They were especially resourceful people who had managed to get out of the Netherlands, through Belgium, through Northern France and over the Demarcation Line pretty much on their own. When they got to Lyon they hired a Frenchman to get them over the final border into Switzerland.

The Frenchman had some colleagues who took the small group to the border village of Colonges-sous-Saleve and checked them in to a hotel. The passeurs told them to meet them outside in the dark of night. So they crept out of the hotel in their stocking feet. The passeurs got them through the fence on the Swiss border and gave them some vague directions of how to get through the fields that were a sort of no-mans-land between the border fence and the Swiss border guard posts. They were supposed to take the early morning tram into Geneva.

Instead, they ran into a Swiss border guard. Official policy at that particular time was to turn illegal refugees back over the border. But this was a compassionate Swiss border guard, so he sent them back under the fence when there were no French gendarmes in sight. Our travelers returned to their hotel.

Nonetheless, French gendarmes woke them up a few hours later because their passeurs had gotten into an argument among themselves about the cash the refugees had paid them. One of them actually went to the police to file an official complaint that his partner in crime (literally) had cheated him of his share of the take.

Vichy policy at the time was that anyone caught near a border without the proper pass was automatically put in prison for 30 days. While our refugees were sitting out that sentence in the prison in Annecy, they actually had to go to court to testify against the passeurs. But they also got a visit from Weidner and his wife.

After serving the 30 days, our travelers found Weidner to thank him for the visit and food he’d brought. He offered to get them into Switzerland definitively. And so they finally got into Switzerland with perfectly legal refugee permits that allowed them to stay there for the rest of the war.