Most of the men and women who rescued others as part of Dutch-Paris were either unmarried or old enough that their children had already left home. But there were men and women who had the courage to join even though they had young children.

Sometimes it turned out alright. For example, a Jewish couple walked out of Amsterdam in 1943, pushing their baby in a stroller. They took refuge in Brussels and worked full time supporting other Jewish people in hiding as part of the Comite. But first they found a good foster home for their baby, now a toddler. They did not want the Germans to find him if they were arrested. Nor did they want their son to grow up in a world run by Nazis.

Also in Brussels, the father of seven children at home joined the Comite. He was extremely active in finding creative ways to fund the rescue efforts and even allowed fugitives to stay at the family home. In this case, his wife clearly shared in his commitment to resistance, although she does not figure in the lists of network members.

Both of those families made it through the war without anyone being arrested. But other families in the line were not so lucky.

On the French side of the Swiss border, a customs agent and his wife actively assisted Dutch-Paris with smuggling documents and people over the border. They opened their home to fugitives on more than one occasion. But the father was shot and arrested by plainclothes police in the spring of 1944. To this day no one has been able to identify exactly who these agents were or what unit they belonged to. He never returned. The mother was arrested in March 1944 when delivering illegal documents. She was liberated from a German prison in August 1944 but was rumored to have suffered from a nervous breakdown.

In Paris an entire family – mother, father, 16 year old twins and 9 year old daughter – spent two nights in a French prison. The family was released, except for the father. He was turned over to the Germans and died in a concentration camp in February 1945. The mother died during a bombing raid in April 1944.

The parents of another family in Paris were both arrested and deported to the concentration camps. The father died there although the mother returned in the summer of 1945.

And, of course, there was the father who was arrested with his 14 year old son in Paris.  The mother, who was pregnant, and young daughter of the family escaped arrest because they were staying at a different hiding place than the father and son.

These parent resisters knew the sort of risks that they were taking for themselves and for their children.  But for them it was much worse to allow the Nazis to implement the hate-filled society of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich.