In my last post I described a seemingly random occurrence, apparently meant as a gesture of goodwill, that had disastrous consequences for the men and women of Dutch-Paris and those they were helping. A random passerby saw a courier drop a notebook and returned it to her in front of the policemen who had arrested her.

Random interventions by passersby, however, did not always have unfortunate consequences. They might also save a person, as happened in another Dutch-Paris story.
A young Dutchman, an Engelandvaarder, was arrested in Paris but jumped out of the Wehrmacht car taking him to Gestapo HQ and ran off into the streets of Paris. He found himself on a busy shopping street with police whistles going off all around. Where to go? What to do?

An older lady who happened to be on the street for some errand of her own saw the young man and heard the police commotion. She walked up to the young man, calmly took his arm and told him to walk her to the metro, slowly. He did so. Police cars drove past them. They reached the metro and from there he made his way back to his safe house. No one was arrested.
Would the young foreigner have been able to evade the police on his own? Probably not. He probably owes his life to the stranger who understood what was going on around her and made a choice to help the man fleeing from the police. She didn’t know anything about him except what she could immediately surmise from his clothing and haircut. But she did know that Paris was occupied by the Nazis. She must not have been a collaborator. She must have disagreed with the authorities of the time.

Was she “in the resistance”? We cannot know. If you take a very broad definition of being in the resistance as acting against the occupation authorities then her action of helping a fugitive escape a police chase puts her “in the resistance” but not necessarily in any organized resistance group. But it doesn’t matter.

The point to this story is that a random passerby spontaneously offered definitive help to someone who was in the resistance without any premeditation or acknowledgment afterward. It was lucky for the Engelandvaarder that he and that particular woman happened to be on the same street at the same time. In the same way, it was unlucky for the courier mentioned in the last post that she was on the same street at the same time as the passerby who gave her notebook to the police.

These are the sort of deus ex machina turns to the story of Dutch-Paris that you might find entirely too far-fetched if you were reading a novel. But this is fact, not fiction. And the facts of history are often peppered with the random intersections of strangers that are commonly called lucky or unlucky.