Today, July 14, is Bastille Day, the French national holiday celebrating freedom and democracy. It shouldn’t be any surprise that during WWII the Vichy regime banned the celebration of Bastille Day. This created a bit of a conundrum in 1944. In those parts of France that were definitively liberated by July 14, people celebrated publicly and with a lot of verve. In those places where the Germans were still in control, such as Paris, celebrations had to be a lot more circumspect. But what about those parts of the country that had never had much of a German presence or could consider themselves under Resistance control?

Two Dutch-Paris couriers found out just how confused the situation could be. Both men in their early 30s, they had left Switzerland a week earlier to try to find out what was happening with their Dutch-Paris colleagues in Paris and Brussels. They made it to Paris, although they couldn’t find most of the people they were looking for. They gave up trying to get to Brussels because there just weren’t any trains taking civilians north. So they headed back to Lyon, but were diverted because of damage to the railways.

When they got to the end of the functioning train line, they found a taxi to take them to Lyon. But they were stopped at a roadblock manned by Germans disguised as peasants. What followed were a few extremely unpleasant hours, but these two wouldn’t have survived so long as Dutch-Paris couriers if they couldn’t bluff their way out of ugly situations. Much to their own surprise, they walked away from that.

That happened on July 14, 1944. As Dutchmen, they probably wouldn’t have noticed that it was Bastille Day except that the homes and villages they passed were decorated with the French flag and French colors to celebrate the forbidden holiday. What the story tells you is that the people who lived in that area near Chalons considered themselves to be liberated before the Germans considered themselves to be defeated there. That is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

It also tells us how confusing and dangerous the last months, weeks and days of the occupation were for civilians. The front lines might have been clear to the Allied armies and the Wehrmacht, but the situation was far from obvious to the people caught between the military Resistance and the Nazi and collaborationist police, paramilitary units and occupation authorities (who were not necessarily under the control of the Wehrmacht). For many civilians the summer of 1944 was intensely dangerous. We tend to forget that when we’re looking at all the photos of civilians overwhelmed with joy on the day that the Allied troops arrived to protect them from the enemy.