A couple of posts ago I wrote about the death of the woman who ran the boarding house that Dutch-Paris rented as a safe house on the escape line in Brussels. The 55 year-old political prisoner was gassed at the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück in January 1945.

Lydia’s story offers a good example of the haphazard and incomplete nature of archives and of why you should never rely on only a single source if you’re trying to figure out what happened in the past.

Because Lydia played a supporting role, she was unknown to most of the other members of the Comite in Brussels and, of course, she was unable to tell her own story after the war. But she makes brief appearances in different sources, which give different pictures of the woman.

In 1946 the Comité made reports on as many people who worked with them as they could. Lydia’s was brief because she could not speak for herself. It said that starting in August 1943 she allowed many Dutch refugees to rent rooms in her boarding house for the usual price. Even though she charged rent, she was very patriotic. In December 1943 she allowed the Comité to rent her entire boarding house.

What the report doesn’t say, of course, is that the woman had no other means of support to pay the taxes on the property or buy food for herself and her lodgers than the rent that those lodgers paid. The Comité did condemn some landladies for greed and refuse to count them as members of the organization, but not Lydia.

Lydia also shows up in a couple of “escape and evasion” reports detailing the evasion of American aviators. The Americans described her as always complaining that she couldn’t do all the work of lodging them without servants and as being “forced” into accepting aviators by the organization. According to them, she was only in it for the money.

These two Americans draw a rather unflattering picture of a greedy and sour woman. But how did they get that impression? Did they speak the same language? Was there a miscommunication in a translation? Or was she truly afraid of having those aviators in her home and showed it by complaining? If so, she wasn’t wrong, given that she was arrested and killed because there were aviators in her home.

The notes that a Dutchman wrote about his escape to England and which his son shared with me, however, tell another story. He found Lydia to be a warm and charming hostess. He himself moved out of her boarding house because the American aviators there were endangering everyone by speaking English in public, going out for walks at all hours and generally not behaving well.

The official missing person file in the Belgian archives offers yet another perspective. A different young Dutchman who had lodged with her on his trip to Spain obviously also found her to be a good person and generous host because he inquired about her before the war ended, in hopes of sending her food, money, clothing and thanks. Three other people also submitted official inquiries about her: another woman who was presumably a friend; a distant relative; and a fellow nature lover who was the secretary of the Friends of the Forest of Soignes, to which she belonged. The forms in that kind of file don’t have a blank space for “describe the personality of the missing person” or “describe your relationship with the missing person”. But we know that people missed her and that she had friends.

None of these sources tell us much about Lydia and some seem to contradict each other. What we can say is that she was a single woman in her 50’s who supported herself by running a boarding house. She enjoyed a nearby forest and had friends in Brussels. She was willing to take the considerable risk of renting out rooms to fugitives for the standard price at a time when many other landlords charged a premium for fugitives. The aviators, at least a few of whom acted without due regard for the safety of the people helping them, caused her work and worry. She was gassed at Ravensbrück.

It’s not heroic, but without people like Lydia the heroes wouldn’t have had anywhere to sleep or to keep the supplies they used to forge false documents. She deserves to be remembered as a resister.