Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, on 11 February 1944, several men and women who belonged to Dutch-Paris met for lunch in Paris at a Chinese restaurant that was probably on the rue Monsieur le Prince in the Latin Quarter near the Sorbonne. It wasn’t a happy meeting. Paris wasn’t a happy place in early 1944. Food was short but Germans and their spies were plentiful.
The men and women at the table were engaged in the dangerous and illegal task of spiriting downed Allied aviators through the French capital and on to Toulouse. Some of them had only met each other recently in the context of Dutch-Paris. That meant that they did not know each other’s true names, or each other’s families or even, really, anything about each other. They had no way of knowing for certain that no one at the table was in the pay of the Germans, but they did know for certain that other Dutch resisters in France had been arrested because of traitors who pretended to be resisters.

The purpose of the meeting was to organize a convoy of aviators set to leave Paris that very evening on the night train to Toulouse. They needed to settle who would bring which aviators to the train station and who would escort them south. One man there also decided that they needed to settle the group’s accounts right then and there. He collected receipts for train tickets and the like in the restaurant in full view of anyone sitting nearby or passing by the large plate glass window. Some of his colleagues thought that doing so was bringing them all into unnecessary risk. This same man insisted that one of the women there pick up a package of black market food that afternoon and bring it with her to the train station to give to the aviators for their trek through the mountains. Again, his colleagues thought that that was an unnecessary risk because the police were looking for black marketers. The resisters went on their way with a plan to meet again at the station several hours later, but the meal did not end in a spirit of friendly fellowship.

Despite her better judgment, one of the couriers picked up the parcel of food for the aviators and then went to a café to wait until it was time to make her next move. While she was waiting, two French police officers demanded to see what was in the package and arrested her. Unfortunately, they belonged to a special collaborationist unit with a nasty reputation for persecuting foreigners and Communists. They were not looking for resisters. They accused the courier of being a foreigner involved in the black market. She was a foreigner, which she admitted. Would they have arrested her if she didn’t have that package of sausage and cheese? It’s impossible to know.

But that arrest led to the courier being turned over to German secret police, who tortured her. That torture led to the arrest of most of the other people at the table that day and eventually to most of the men and women involved with Dutch-Paris’s aviator escape line. Some of them did not survive the concentration camps. The acrimony between fellow resisters at the lunch table at that Chinese restaurant in Paris survived many years after the war, reminding us that resisters were not just courageous and self-sacrificing. They were men and women with complex emotions. The courage could come with fear and recrimination.