Continuing on with our discussion of the use of the railways by escape lines, we should recognize the railway men who belonged to Dutch-Paris. There were two that I know of.

The first was a Dutch railway official who worked at the Gare du Nord, the station where all the trains to and from the north, including Belgium and the Netherlands, stopped in Paris. Our man in the station was a source of invaluable information and of less travelled ways in and out of the station. He also opened his family home to the organization for meetings and sent his teenage sons out with messages. The entire family was arrested and kept in jail by the French for two nights. After that, the French police turned our man over to the Germans but let the family go. Our man died in the concentration camps.

Our second railway man was a supervisor for the French railways in the Pyrenees. Or at least he way until he was ordered to arrange the loading of forced laborers onto a train bound for the Third Reich. His refusal to do so made him a criminal. He spent the rest of the war underground, working as a passeur or guide for downed Allied aviators and other fugitives over the Pyrenees into Spain.

There were undoubtedly other railway employees who helped Dutch-Paris out in one way or another without committing to outright resistance as part of the line. It’s likely, for example, that the men and women working for the line in Paris knew which trains to Toulouse were not patrolled by document inspectors because someone in the railways told them.

Just as Dutch-Paris could not have escorted fugitives across occupied Europe to safety in neutral Switzerland or Spain without using the train, they could not have done it without help from the railway workers.