We think of war as a state of emergency and a crisis. And it absolutely is for anyone in a war zone with active military operations. A bombing raid (or, today, missile raid) is most definitely an immediate crisis. Being in a village where soldiers are shooting at each other is clearly a state of emergency.

But when you’re thinking about World War II, it’s important to remember that for the majority of people in Europe most of the six years of war were not an ongoing crisis. Certain groups – such as anyone in a concentration camp – could be said to have endured years of crisis, of course. But for most, there were flashes of crisis during military operations or repressive actions by the occupier. In between those, civilians got used to the mundane facts of occupation – to having to prove their identity at any moment, to having to use crowded and unreliable public transportation, to having to queue for food, to having family members gone away as soldiers or laborers.

But civilians found ways to accommodate to the new reality of occupation. They carried their identity papers. They put wooden wheels on their bicycles and made arrangements with suppliers outside of the official rationing system, meaning the grey or black markets. They missed the person kept away by the war, but they found ways to manage without him or her.
Resistance was a way of accommodating materially without accommodating morally. Resisters also carried identity papers. It’s just that sometimes those papers were false. They were probably more aware of transportation difficulties than most because resistance required movement, often times with something contraband like clandestine newssheets or downright illegal like fugitives.  They had to stand in line for the same rations as everyone else, unless they didn’t get any rations at all.  And their actions were quite likely to make them the missing person, executed or deported to a concentration camp.

What resisters didn’t do was accept the occupation as an inevitable status quo.

So resisters lived in the same material normality as everyone else. But they acted against it by resisting the occupier. Obviously resistance was dangerous by its very nature. That constant danger and the fear and anxiety that it carried with it, made the life of a resister a constant crisis for months and even years.  So while the experience of WWII was not a constant state of emergency for most civilians, it was one long alarm bell for resisters.