Over 30 men and women of Dutch-Paris were deported to the concentration camps because they opposed the Nazis as resisters. They did not all end up in the same camps or sub-camps. Nor did all of those who survived take the same routes back home after the Allies liberated the camps.

The women of Dutch-Paris, for example, were all sent to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück but they were not all kept there.  One was beaten to death by guards. Another was gassed to death. One died of disease and malnutrition in a sub-camp mere days after the Russians liberated her. Some of them were moved to sub-camps that might have been as informal as a group of women being used as slave labor in a factory.

The Dutch-Paris women who were still alive in the main camp at Ravensbrück in April 1945 were rescued by the White Busses organized by the Swedish Red Cross and then returned to Paris after a period of convalescence (except for the courier who married a Swede). That counted as the luxury route in 1945.

Two young women who worked for Dutch-Paris as couriers and guides were arrested, tortured and then deported for their illegal work. They were each removed to smaller camps and set to work as slave labor. When the Soviets started moving into the Third Reich from the east, the SS started evacuating the concentration camps in the path of the battle. This was not out of concern for the well-being of the inmates. They wanted to keep the labor. They set the prisoners on what are known as death marches to camps further west. They shot anyone who could not managed the marches.

One of these Dutch-Paris women was moved from the sub-camp to Buchenwald in February 1945. On April 13, 1945, the SS rounded up the prisoners for another death march to the west. They walked almost non-stop without food or rest and exposed to the rain and cold for ten long days. On the tenth day, our woman and four others escaped from the column. “After many difficulties” they met up with some French POWs who had been captured almost five years earlier. The Frenchmen found the political prisoners uniforms so they could sneak into the POW camp so they could sleep with a roof over their head and have a little bit to eat. But then then the POWs were forced to evacuate. Our woman spent an entire night marching in a downpour but was liberated by American troops the next day – 7 May.

The other young Dutch-Paris courier had been sent to a different sub-camp but was also forced onto a death march. She, too, was liberated by Allied soldiers on 7 May 1945. Neither woman goes into detail about what happened to her after she was liberated, but they were most probably given food and clothing, allowed to rest and then transported to Paris for repatriation.