How to Flee the Gestapo

I’m taking the title of this blog and the following story from an article published by the Resistance newspaper Het Parool in 1947. It’s the story of how a young man (b. 1918) who we’ll call Valmont joined Dutch-Paris. As many other Dutch Jews did in 1942, Valmont joined a “convoy” to get to Switzerland, […]

There were all sorts of ways to join the Resistance. For some, it was just another, more dynamic, way of hiding. Threatened with deportation to “the east” (i.e. the extermination camps) in 1942 like all other Jewish persons in the Netherlands, the “van Caneghem” family found a hiding place in July 1942. The parents, their daughter […]

Following my last post about joining the Resistance, I’ll be offering a series of examples of how members of Dutch-Paris ended up in the Line. We’ll start with the chef de reseau himself,John Henry Weidner (1912-1994). Weidner’s father was a Dutch Seventh Day Adventist preacher who taught at the SDA college at Collonges sur Salève, […]

Say it’s 1943 and you’ve had enough of the Occupier and his brutal ways. You know there’s a Resistance because you’ve read the illegal press and you’ve heard the rumors. You want to join, but how? It’s not like you can walk down to the local recruiting office or look them up in the phone […]