How to Flee the Gestapo

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 […]

Just about 75 years ago, on October 13, 1943, Jean Weidner left Switzerland illegally but with the assistance of a Swiss officer, to create the Dutch-Paris escape line. Up until this point, he and his colleagues had been running an escape line between Lyon (France) and Geneva (Switzerland). Weidner himself had not been to northern […]

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for a documentary about a Dutch Jew who was in southern France from 1940 to September 1942.* Like Weidner, this man, whom we’ll call Sal, was involved with the efforts of the Dutch consulate in Lyon to help Dutch Jews in 1942. The director asked me a […]

As I explained in the last post, Jean Weidner asked the Dutch ambassador in Switzerland for money to support needy Dutchmen in southern France on March 23, 1943. The ambassador was sympathetic but couldn’t give him any money at that time. A friend, however, had an idea. This friend was a Jewish refugee whom Weidner […]

Here’s another story connected to the forgotten Dutch escape line I described in the last post. It involves a German Jewish family who had the foresight to leave Germany while they could. They relocated to Amsterdam until the war made that city unsafe as well. They moved again, this time to a flat above a […]

As I mentioned in the last post, Dutch-Paris was far from the only escape line operating in Europe during the Second World War, but only a few enjoy postwar fame. Here’s an example of one that I came across repeatedly in my research but has been all but forgotten. If this line has a name, […]

A reader asked me why the Dutch edition of the book is called Gewone Helden (Ordinary Heroes) when everyone involved with Dutch-Paris was far from ordinary. In fact, she said, they were extraordinarily courageous and selfless. It goes without saying that she is correct. I’ll share my explanation below in case anyone else was wondering […]

Timothy Snyder’s last lesson in On Tyranny is: “Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.” You may think that courage should be left to the professionals like trained military special forces, but notice that he says “be as […]

Let’s continue with how Dutch-Paris illustrates several of the lessons in Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth-Century. We covered lessons 9, 10 and 11, which are about the importance of finding out the facts for yourself and thinking for yourself. They bring us to lesson 12, which is about an important element […]

In the last post, we talked about how the men and women of Dutch-Paris illustrate a few of the lessons in Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. They did not accept the slogans of propaganda but instead were “kind to our language” (lesson 9) and “believed in truth” (lesson 10). The […]