How to Flee the Gestapo

One of the more unexpected difficulties I’ve encountered in researching Dutch-Paris has to do with people’s names. I knew, of course, that it would be difficult to uncover the names of all the members of the line in the first place. Resisters hid their identities; so well that some of them still count as missing […]

One of the things that makes history so fascinating is that if ten people see the same event, they will have ten different versions or explanations of that event.  This is especially true of a catastrophic event such as arrest during the second world war, which was often only the prelude to torture, the unmitigated […]

When he was still 20 years old, R.F. Anderson took off in a B-17 named “Martha” to bomb Brunswick, Germany. The German air defenses disabled the plane but the pilot and Anderson, as the navigator, managed to nurse it far enough westward that they could bail out over the Netherlands, jumping 500 feet into a […]

While some resisters struggled to forget the war, others came to feel that they had a duty to remember it publicly. This seems to have been especially true among survivors of the concentration camps. Such was the case with a Dutch woman named Anika who was a student at the Sorbonne when the war started. […]

My research on Dutch-Paris constantly reminds me that wars don’t end when the fighting stops. This is most obvious in the cases of those resisters who survived the concentration camps but then died young after years of broken health. But even those who escaped deportation and made successful careers for themselves never quite got over […]

The Netherlands celebrates Liberation Day with an official holiday on the Fifth of May every fifth year. But the Dutch remember the war every year with two minutes of silence at 8 pm on the Fourth of May, known as Dodenherdenkening (Remembrance of the Dead). People gather at monuments across the country, with the biggest […]