The last two posts described episodes in the history of Dutch-Paris in which a stranger on the street acted spontaneously in a way that helped or hindered someone associated with Dutch-Paris. The Engelandvaarder in one of those stories assured me that he’d benefited from good luck and that luck played an important role in everyone’s life during the war.

If you don’t like the idea of luck, you can also call it being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time. There are plenty of examples of that as well in the history of Dutch-Paris.
Here’s a very unfortunate example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When the Gestapo, Abwehr and other German police decided to make their move against Dutch-Paris in February 1944 they did so in a coordinated series of arrests in Paris, Lyon, Annecy and Brussels. They had a list of people to arrest at certain addresses.

One of those names was the Dutch consul in Lyon, an insurance agent. The Gestapo arrived at his business address, the insurance office, to arrest him. For good measure, just in case he was up to any resistance activities at that very moment, they also arrested everyone else in the office. Some of the people arrested that day were in the office to pay their insurance premiums, some were there to see the consul because they were on the run.

The Gestapo did release some of those they arrested, including the consul’s secretary. For unknown reasons they did not appreciate how embroiled she was with the consul’s and Dutch-Paris’s help to fugitives. But three of the people they arrested were a Dutch Jewish couple and their high school daughter. None of them survived the extermination camps.

Why did that family go to the insurance office at that particular time on that particular day? None of them survived the war to tell anyone the answer. If they wrote it down, say in a letter or a diary, the papers have been lost. Or at least I as the historian of Dutch-Paris have not found them.

There’s a certain level of cause and effect that historians can answer if they can find enough documentation. Why was that family killed in the Holocaust? Because they were in the office of the Dutch consul at the moment when the Gestapo came to arrest him and arrested them as well. Why did the Engelandvaarder of the last post escape the Wehrmacht officers who arrested him? Because a woman on the street escorted him to the metro.

But there’s a deeper level of cause and effect that historians cannot explain. Why was the family in the consul’s office just then? Why was that woman on the street instead of at home just then? We don’t know. Of course the family and the woman had their reasons that add up into a personal timeline of cause and effect. Historians don’t know why because they don’t have enough information.
So you could say that what looks like luck is just a lack of information because no one, least of all a historian, is omniscient. But I suspect that even with more and more information, you would eventually get to a level in a story that is a random intersection of two strangers.

I also suspect that that old Engelandvaarder would tell me to stop chasing down rabbit holes. Life is full of coincidences that we call luck. And that would remind me that a historian’s task is not just to uncover the causes and effects of an event but to respect the interpretations and understandings that the people involved gave to that event.