How to Flee the Gestapo

Some people are just plain helpful.  Take the case of a young Dutch woman we’ll call Catherine [born 1919].  Because she was working for the Dutch Chamber of Commerce in […]

Here’s the story of how a young man (b. 1916) became one of the most important members of Dutch-Paris.  Thierry, as we’ll call him, grew up in Antwerp speaking mainly […]

The situation in Occupied Europe was so fluid and communications so tenuous, that sometimes even the professional spooks didn’t believe what was going on. Take the story of a young […]

You needed a certain entrepreneurial spirit to start up and run an escape line during the war. There’s no need to elaborate on the risks involved, far worse than bankruptcy. […]

Some people ended up in the Resistance bit by bit, because their first act of kindness led to another, that led them to do something else that led onward to […]

A silent night could be a night of peace or it could be a night of complicity. It could be the silence of not speaking out to help someone in […]

Dutch-Paris defies easy categorization even within the extraordinary ranks of Resistance organizations. It was not a group of patriots intent on freeing their home, nor was it a group dedicated […]

On 29 July 1944 the Germans executed a Frenchman we’ll call Albert for what they called terrorism and aiding and abetting the enemy. He was certainly guilty: he’d been in […]

Just because dossiers on resisters are now available, doesn’t mean that the dossiers have more information than a name and date of birth (sometimes not even that). But sometimes you […]

Around the same time that the French started to open up their WWII archives (the 1990’s), they also started to collect the testimonies of Resistants. As part of this effort, […]