Most of the displaced persons who had been taken from their home countries in western Europe as prisoners or forced laborers returned home in the late spring and early summer of 1945. But the situation in what had been the Third Reich was chaotic at best. Some people did not return.

Their families grew increasingly worried as the weeks went by without their loved one returning or sending word. Was the missing person just held up for some reason? Perhaps he or she was sick and in a hospital? Had they even survived the war?

There was not much that someone could do except wait. The Red Cross took down a missing person’s particulars and added them to the catalog of missing persons. They also asked returning deportees who they had seen in the camps, especially who they had seen die.  In Paris it was possible to put a note on a bulletin board at the Hotel Lutetia, which was being used as a clearing house for returning deportees. The hope was that the person or someone who knew them might see the note and send word. For the most part, families had to rely on the kindness of other former prisoners and deportees who had known their loved one and could tell them when and where they’d seen them last or if they’d seen them die.

Many prisoners and deportees did feel an obligation to visit the families of friends to tell them what had happened. But sometimes it took months for that friend to arrive back home and visit the family. Or, if the friend didn’t know how to contact the family, for the friend to see a notice on a bulletin board or in a newspaper asking for information.

At least four Dutch-Paris families waited many months before they found out what had happened to their missing person. In one case, the family found out how their sister and daughter had died because they placed an ad in a newspaper asking for information. In another case, someone who had known the father of the family and saw him die managed to find the family and tell them. In another case the wife of a deported Dutch-Paris man heard a rumor that someone who had been at the same camp was visiting their neighborhood. This was more than a year after the war ended. She went to talk to this man, who had known her husband and was able to tell her when and how he died.

In the saddest case of all, another prisoner told the family that he had seen their loved one enter a factory that was then bombed and burned to the ground. This was already many months after the war and should have provided the answers that they needed. But at the same time, the Soviet government gave the Dutch government a list of names of Dutch citizens who were in the Soviet Union. There was the missing man’s name. This gave the desperate wife hope. She took it to mean that her husband had been liberated by the Soviets and was being held hostage by them in a game of international politics. It took over a year to get the Soviet government to admit that they had spelled the name on the list incorrectly. The widow finally had to admit that her husband was dead.

To this day, the Dutch government has a list of several hundred missing persons from the Second World War because they were unable to establish what happened to those men and women. The war’s tragedies kept unfolding long after if officially ended on 8 May 1945.