Searching for the Dutch-Paris Escape Line
We’ve been discussing the necessary qualities of a resistance leader, or, really, any resister who intended to survive the war. You needed to be a good judge of character, good at making friends and able to act decisively. You also had to be flexible.
Actually, any civilian needed a certain flexibility of mind and attitude to navigate the Nazi occupation. I don’t mean the sort of moral flexibility that would allow someone to justify turning a blind eye to some glaring injustices, although that did happen. I’m referring to a much more practical flexibility in day to day life. For example, putting enough food on the table. There were a few French civil servants who refused to accept any food from any source other than the official rations. They and their families ended up malnourished. The rest of the population got highly flexible with ways and means to supplement the official rations, from raising a rabbit on the balcony to engaging in the black market.
Resisters took that sort of flexibility and creativity up a notch. They needed to be willing and able to change their route in an instant because they saw someone running towards them from ahead, or a German troop truck sped past them from behind, or they heard a noise that could have been a misfiring engine or a gunshot, or any of a number of small, suspicious deviations to the norm.
Here’s another example. Many resisters and certainly all resistance leaders had false identities. They could prepare their backstories for the false identities. But if a police officer asked, they also needed to be able to explain why that false character was in a particular place at a particular time. That took quick, and flexible, thinking.
Most importantly, plans went awry. Someone didn’t show up, or, worse, someone in authority like a German officer did show up. Or someone panicked. Or the bus broke down. Of course a wise leader had contingency plans in place. All of the leaders of Dutch-Paris, for example, had their own safe houses in every city and their own ways to travel in and out of those cities. But it was impossible to foresee every possible problem. It took mental flexibility to either get around an unexpected problem or get themselves from that problem to the safety net of their back-up plans.
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