Seventy-five years ago today, on November 18, 1943, the young man in charge of daily operations for the Comité in Brussels was arrested. This was not the first time that this particular young Dutchman, we’ll call him Paul, had been arrested. He and his entire family had been captured as they fled from their home in the Netherlands towards Switzerland. Paul had jumped out of the train taking them all to Auschwitz. He’d made his way to the home of a friend of his father’s in Brussels. They introduced him to the Comité.

Paul was in charge of the Comité’s daily operations of making sure that fugitives had hiding places and got regular deliveries of money and false documents. He also had to figure out how to get some of the people they were helping to Switzerland or Spain. The Comité had already agreed to join in Jean Weidner’s new escape line at that point, but the new route wasn’t quite functioning yet. So Paul went to the apartment of an elderly widow to meet with the members of a separate escape line who had a way to get aviators out of occupied Europe.

Unfortunately, Paul wasn’t the only one who knew about this other escape line. The Germans raided the widow’s apartment while he was there and arrested everyone they saw. They came up for trial in a Luftwaffe court in February 1944. Paul was accused of being a Jew in bad company. The members of the other line had managed to keep his role in the Comité as a rescuer of hundreds of other Jews a secret. One of the leaders of the other group was executed. The rest were deported to the concentration camps. But Paul and the widow stayed in the local prison in Brussels. Why? The documents suggest that some of the older men in the Comité protected them by, possibly, bribery or the stalling tactics of lawyers.

As part of integrating into the new Dutch-Paris line, the Comité did a little structural re-organization. They split Paul’s job into two jobs. From then on, one person knew how the “social work” of hiding fugitives worked and another person knew how the “transport work” for fugitives operated. This improvement in security proved its worth a few months later when the Germans captured almost everyone involved with the escape line without finding out about the hundreds of people Dutch-Paris was hiding in and around Brussels.