How to Flee the Gestapo

When they liberated the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, horrified British soldiers buried the dead and tried to save the living. They also required that the German adults who lived near the camp come into the camp to see what had happened there. And they filmed what they saw. That film was made […]

The collapse of the Third Reich and the end of the Second World War 75 years ago was met with general rejoicing, but it also represented a threat of a global pandemic. The Nazis had forcibly displaced millions of people from their homes across Europe and brought them into central Europe as prisoners and/or laborers […]

Seventy five years ago the Western Allies were moving into the Third Reich from the west while the Soviet Red Army steamrollered toward Berlin from the east. The armies had a very clear military objective: the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich. But they also had a vast and sprawling civilian affairs problem. The Americans […]

A couple of posts ago I wrote about the death of the woman who ran the boarding house that Dutch-Paris rented as a safe house on the escape line in Brussels. The 55 year-old political prisoner was gassed at the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück in January 1945. Lydia’s story offers a good example of […]

January 28th marks the 75th anniversary of the death of one of the minor players in the story of Dutch-Paris. She was a 55 year-old spinster who supported herself by running a boarding house in one of the newer neighborhoods of Brussels. We’ll call her Lydia. The archives do not have much to share about […]

Seventy-five years ago, during the Christmas season of 1944, the people of western Europe had both reason for hope and reason for fear. They had reason to hope because the Allies had landed in Normandy more than six months earlier and already liberated most of France, Belgium and southern Holland. Anyone who saw the well-fed […]

August 15th marks the 75th anniversary of the Allied Landings in southern France on the beaches of Provence, known as Operation Dragoon. These are not as well remembered as the Allied Landings in Normandy a couple months earlier. But the people who lived there and the German troops and their collaborators who were still in […]

Today, May 5, is the 74th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands. The Dutch have a big party to celebrate every five years. But every single year they commemorate the war and occupation on May 4 with solemn memorials across the country attended by huge crowds. It’s not that the Dutch weren’t happy or […]

Everyone knows that being in the Resistance was a dangerous business. But not everyone realizes that if you were good at it, it could also have been dangerous after the Liberation. Take the case of a young French woman (born 1924) whom we’ll call Jeanne. From mid-1942 until August 1944 Jeanne and her mother brought […]

There’s no denying that the war was a hard time to be a mother.  My father’s memories of his mother during the war are of her crying in their kitchen in Maastricht because there was no food for the baby (him) and of telling his much older brother to keep his (illegal) rifle by the […]