One of the Comet escape line’s teenage couriers recently passed away at the age of 95. Like Dutch-Paris, Comet was also created by civilians. Unlike Dutch-Paris, Comet emphasized helping Allied servicemen to evade the Nazis by either taking them from Belgium to Spain or hiding them in Belgium.

Both escape lines relied on the dedication and courage of men and women of all ages. And they both used teenagers as couriers and guides. By teenagers I mean boys and girls who were still living at home and going to high school, not young men and women who had already launched on university or business careers.

In every case that I know of, the teenagers started working for the escape line because one of their relatives, usually a parent, was heavily involved in the escape line. At some point, the adult relative needed someone to carry a message or fetch a fugitive. And so a 14 year old boy walked nine miles in the dark to bring aviators from the place where they were hiding to his father at home. A refugee girl whose family fled to southern France in 1940 spent much of the war carrying illegal messages and documents for her aunt, who was shuttling aviators and other fugitives through her home in a village outside Toulouse. Fifteen year old twins dressed alike and split up on the streets of Paris to confuse any police.

The archival documents do not record how these youngsters joined the line. Did they beg and plead to be given a job? Were they simply the only ones available at a critical time? Did their parents think that their youth would protect them from German scrutiny? Did the children’s involvement increase the parent’s anxiety?

Because the teenagers did not all escape the consequences of resisting the Nazis. One of the boys spent a long, cold winter hiding in the high mountains after a friend warned his family that the Gestapo were on the way to their home. Another was arrested with his father. The German interrogators made the 14 year old watch his father being tortured while promising the boy that if he would only give them some information, they would stop hurting his father. But the father had warned the boy that this might happen and proudly recounted after the war that his son had remained silent, “like a hero.” The father survived the concentration camps, but the son disappeared a few months before the war ended.

Fortunately, most of the teenagers survived the war. But so much anxiety and courage during the formative years of adolescence combined with their postwar identity as a resister must surely have shaped the rest of their lives.