Seventy-five years and a couple of weeks ago, in November 1943, Jean Weidner travelled to occupied Paris to find resisters who would be willing to join the new escape line that we know as Dutch-Paris. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could advertise in the newspapers, and Weidner hadn’t been in the city since the Wehrmacht marched in in June 1940. But he had heard about a minor diplomat at the Dutch embassy who had been involved in resistance pretty much since the first day the Germans had shown up. We’ll call him Felix.

Felix hasn’t survived underground as long as he had without being careful. He agreed to meet Weidner for the first time on a crowded street that had plenty of exits if Weidner’s sister made the introduction. And he didn’t trust Weidner’s claim that he had the support of the Dutch government in exile until after Weidner took him to Switzerland to meet the Dutch ambassador.

It was a harrowing journey for Felix, whose false documents were not ready on time. The short and round Felix used false documents made for the tall and rectangular Weidner on the long train journey to the Swiss border.  The false documents with someone else’s photo worried him the whole way.   They rode in an ambulance to the border itself with Weidner faking a case of appendicitis in the back. Then they strolled along the street until a French policeman pedaled by with his kepi askew, meaning the coast was clear at the border. They dashed under the barbed wire and into Switzerland. The fact that the coffee was made out of actual coffee beans rather than the rationed substitute they had to make do with in occupied France impressed Felix as much as what the ambassador had to say.

A few days later Weidner and Felix returned to Paris by the same route except without the dramatics of an ambulance. Felix was now the line’s station chief for Paris. He and his group of resisters specialized in taking care of downed Allied aviators as they came through the French capital. In fact, it was Felix who gave the escape line its name when an aviator asked who was helping him. Felix didn’t know because they didn’t have a name for themselves beyond “the organization.” On the spur of the moment, he said Dutch-Paris because he and most (but not all) of his colleagues were Dutch and they were in Paris. The aviator told the name to the officers who debriefed him in London. When the British and American armies arrived in the summer of 1944, Weidner and all his colleagues found out that they were called the Dutch-Paris line.