Here’s some encouraging news for the new year.  Last March a Dutch woman contacted me about her uncle, who had been arrested in March 1944 and deported to the concentration camps under the harshest prisoner regime (Nacht und Nebel) as a resister.

Her uncle’s name did not appear in my own research notes, but I was able to suggest various archives that might have documents about her uncle as a Dutch resister who had been arrested and deported from France.

Just recently, she found documents in the Nationaal Archief in Den Haag about her uncle.  One of them is a letter or testimonial from a well-known member of Dutch-Paris stating that she worked with the uncle during the war.  The uncle brought food from Versailles to Paris for Engelandvaarders being helped by Dutch-Paris.  Other documents report that he was arrested in Versailles on the same day as a Frenchman who supplied shoes for fugitives to Dutch-Paris was arrested.  Sadly, the young Frenchman did not survive the concentration camps although the uncle did.

So now, through the research efforts of his niece, we can add the name of B.H. Koolman to the list of members of Dutch-Paris.

You might be asking why it’s taken so many decades to add him to the Dutch-Paris roster. As so often, the answer has to do with the way the original membership lists and archives were compiled.  Resistance was a dangerous and clandestine endeavor. You didn’t give your full name, birthdate and address when you joined.  And you usually only knew the individuals with whom you yourself worked.  The fewer people you knew, and the fewer people who knew about your own criminal activity, the safer it was for everyone.

After the liberation, however, you needed the people you’d been working with to introduce you to others in the network and vouch for you as a true resister. We don’t have many details about what Koolman did with Dutch-Paris or who he did it with. All we know is that he brought food (outside the rations) to one particular courier in Paris. She may well have been his only contact with the network, but she was also arrested and sent to the concentration camps.  If she had died there, Koolman would never have been able to prove that he’d been in Dutch-Paris.

Fortunately, she did not die in the camps, but she did stay in Sweden after the Swedish Red Cross rescued her and other female political prisoners from Ravensbrück.  Sweden was a long way away from Paris in 1944-1945. The courier did not submit the usual report about her work in Dutch-Paris.  There’s a good chance that no one ever asked her to.  So she didn’t write down Koolman’s name so it could be added to the list.  But Koolman must have kept up with her somehow because he was able to ask for her testimonial in 1963.  It was duly put in the archives and now has been found by his niece.

I suspect that Koolman’s predicament of having been a resister but being unable to prove it was not all that uncommon. He might not even have wanted to prove anything when he returned from the concentration camps in 1945. But eventually he did.  If you’re looking for a relative in the archives, keep looking.  There’s no guarantee, but you might yet find what you’re searching for.