Continuing our discussion of the fall-out of the wave of arrests in Dutch-Paris in late February 1944, we come to the question of what the survivors should do. The sensible thing would have been to call it a day and scatter into false identities and new hiding places far from Paris, Brussels or Lyon. But they couldn’t do that because too many people were depending on them. There were Jews in hiding places and Allied aviators in safe houses waiting to move onward to Spain. Weidner and his colleagues would not abandon these people, so they kept Dutch-Paris going.

But Jean Weidner did not have to lose another sister to the Germans. One sister, Gabrielle, was sitting in prison as a hostage meant to lure Weidner into giving himself up. But Weidner’s other sister, Annette, was at large in Paris. The Germans probably didn’t know that Annette existed or that she was in Paris. Officially, she was in the Netherlands working as a nurse and living with their parents. But Annette had made the clandestine journey to Paris several months earlier and was living with her sister. At the time of her arrest, Gabrielle pretended that Annette was the maid and sent her away. She hid under the front porch until the Germans left with her sister, then spent the day looking for her brother to give him the news.

A week or so later, when the extent of the catastrophe was becoming clearer, Weidner decided that Annette had to go to Switzerland. The fact that German police chased them through a Metro station probably gave him a sense of urgency about it. Weidner himself needed to stay in Paris, so he sent his sister and a report of the situation with his lieutenant Jacques Rens. Weidner and Rens had made the illegal trip back and forth between Paris and Switzerland so often that it had become almost routine. But they had no way of knowing how much of that route the Germans had uncovered.

So Rens bought a new suit, got a hair cut and put on eyeglasses. He had new false papers made and took a lot of cash with him to use as bribes. He and Annette took the long way to Geneva. They did not stop at any of the usual places along the way or take any of the usual trains. In fact, they skied many miles to cross the border into Switzerland. Annette needed to be hospitalized for exhaustion when they arrived, but she was safe.

Rens ate some good food, made his reports about what they thought they knew about the arrests, and went back into occupied territory to help rebuild the network.