It’s easy to forget how long the Nazi occupation of western Europe went on.  All Belgium and the northern part of France, for example, were occupied from the summer of 1940 to the summer of 1944. Most of the continent lived under the Nazi boot for longer, but even so, four years is a long time to be living under the threats and deprivations of the Wehrmacht, the SS and the Gestapo.

In most places, however, the occupation ground down on life so that the shortages and fear became “normal.”  Times were very bad, but people still died of natural causes, had children, changed jobs and even had romances and got married.  Here’s a story of a wartime romance that became extraordinary because it brushed up against Dutch-Paris.

In March 1943 a young man who worked in the postal service in The Hague – we’ll call him Bill – proposed to a young woman who was training to be a nurse – we’ll call her Beth. Her family was very happy about the engagement until, like so many young Dutch men, Bill’s name came up in the labor draft. He was legally obliged to go work in the Third Reich, possibly in an agricultural position but possibly also in a factory in the war zone. Very few Dutchmen wanted to work in Germany and quite a few of them went underground to avoid it.

We don’t know if Bill knew this before he proposed or not, but Beth had close family in France who were involved in rescuing people from the Nazis. They suggested that Bill go to England to serve in the Dutch army rather than going to the Third Reich. They were confident that their resister relations in France would get him to England if he got himself to Paris. So in early July 1943 Bill got himself – illegally – to Paris, where he surprised his future in-laws by introducing himself as Beth’s fiancé.

As expected, the family got him from Paris to Annecy and gave him a job with Dutch-Paris helping refugees and carrying messages in the region along the Swiss border.  He left Paris on July 23. He left Annecy for Spain on a Dutch-Paris convoy on October 10 and arrived in Barcelona on October 18, 1943. By the standards of the day for illegal travel, that was a quick trip without notable incident.  He then traveled to England and joined the Dutch secret service.  He parachuted into the occupied Netherlands not once but twice.

Meanwhile, Beth made her own way to Paris after Bill had already left. She lived with her relations and did a few things here and there for Dutch-Paris. After the big round up in February 1944, Beth made a harrowing trip to Switzerland, where she stayed for the rest of the war. As far as she knew, she was still engaged to Bill. It wasn’t until after the war that she found out that Bill had married a woman he’d met in England. Their love story was just another casualty of the war.