Searching for the Dutch-Paris Escape Line
In my last post I mentioned a Dutch-Paris resister in Paris whom we’ll call Micheline. She acted as a nurse to aviators who needed medical help in Paris. One of these was an Englishman whose childhood polio recurred while he was on the run from the Germans.
When the Germans rolled up the Dutch-Paris aviator line in Paris in February 1944, this Englishman was in the apartment next door to Micheline’s. It belonged to a Swiss man who was also part of the network. The German police appear to have known that both of them were involved in Dutch-Paris before they arrived at their apartment building. Both were arrested, along with the RAF pilot.
Soon after the arrests, other Germans in big trucks arrived to strip the two apartments of anything valuable, which included furniture, linens, food, at times even the electrical wiring. They did not pillage the homes of everyone in Dutch-Paris whom they arrested. This suggests that the Germans found these two guilty as soon as they found the aviator and knew before they were even questioned that these two resisters would not be coming home.
As if being arrested with a “Luftterrorist” (air terrorist, as the Germans called Allied aviators), wasn’t bad enough, the German police found a calling card in one of Micheline’s coats when they ransacked her apartment. The card was signed with the alias of a British intelligence agent. Earlier in the war, Micheline had agreed to hide weapons in her apartment for him, presumably through connections she had made through her late husband. Fortunately, there was no incriminating evidence from the British intelligence service in her apartment in February 1944. Except for that forgotten calling card.
But it was enough. German police interrogated this 56-year-old woman seven or eight times, including three sessions of the notorious baignoire, in which they submerged the victim in icy water just until the point of drowning. Then they deported her to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück. She was rescued by the Swedish Red Cross and repatriated to Paris in July 1945.
The Swiss man also returned from the concentration camps.
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