Over the fifteen years that I’ve been keeping this blog about Dutch-Paris and grassroots resistance, many people have reached out to me from across the globe asking questions and offering information. Some of these queries have turned into long and friendly email correspondences in which I’ve offered as much research help as I could and in return been offered facts and stories about Dutch-Paris that I couldn’t have found in archives.

Still today the most thrilling comment I’ve received came early in my research. It was just a simple message, not more than two sentences. But in it an old man from Iowa identified himself as one of the Allied aviators who was arrested at the Dutch-Paris safe house in Brussels in February 1944. For a historian like me, it was a thrilling honor to reach back in time to connect with a person who played a role in the events I was piecing together blindly in the archives.

What’s more, once this one man had given me his name – which none of the resisters who survived had ever known – I was able to go through the British and American archives to find the names of the other aviators arrested with him. And, with some coaxing, he himself told me about what happened to him and the others in a rogue Luftwaffe prison after their arrest. Let’s just say it didn’t conform to the regulations of the Geneva Convention.

Since then other people have contacted me about their parents, uncles, grandmothers who were in Dutch-Paris or assisted by Dutch-Paris. Many have been generous enough to share their family stories and photos with me. I’ve shared some of them in my public talks. Together we’ve expanded the history of Dutch-Paris. But more than that, we’ve been building a web of connections based on Dutch-Paris.

But it’s not limited to me. Since the beginning of this project a Dutchman who is now a very good friend has been promoting connections among the living descendants of Dutch-Paris. He’s also been looking for traces of his father and grandfather as they escaped the Nazis. He already knew most of that story, but just recently he found the family of the man with whom his grandfather was hiding in the French Alps when the Germans arrested him and sent him to Auschwitz. He’s known the man’s name for years. Now he knows the man’s niece and her whole family because they flew to Amsterdam to share their previously lost uncle’s story and visit the museum where the grandfather and the uncle are remembered.

In this season of the new year, let’s celebrate not only the courage of the men and women of Dutch-Paris during the second world war, but also the intergenerational personal connections that remembering Dutch-Paris has created in the here and now. During the war such connections – some of which veered on the random – built a network that was powerful enough to save lives from the persecution of the totalitarian monolith of the Third Reich. It was powerful enough that even now, decades later, it is still sparking connections across generations and long distances.