Brussels was a dangerous place for civilians 75 years ago, during the summer of 1944, especially for men of military age.  The German occupation authorities had absolutely no tolerance for anything that could interfere with their military operations and heightened their surveillance of the civilian population.   They also rounded men up off the street to ship off to the Third Reich as forced labor.   If Dutch-Paris needed to deliver money or ration coupons to any of the 400 people they were hiding in and around the city or to visit them for any reason during those last months of the war, it was a woman who ventured into the streets to do it.

Dutch-Paris was able to avoid further arrests during that summer, at times very narrowly, but they did already have people in prison.   There was an elderly woman and a young man who were arrested in November 1943 during a raid on another resistance network.   They had been tried and sentenced to deportation but had not been deported along with their co-defendants.  The only explanation for that is bribery, but there’s no proof of it.   The two of them, however, were included in the last trainload of political prisoners slated to leave Brussels for the Third Reich, known as the “phantom train.”   Belgian resisters managed to misplace the train long enough that it never left Belgium and the political prisoners were liberated with the rest of their compatriots.

Other members of Dutch-Paris had been arrested at the safe house on rue Franklin on February 28, 1944.  Their landlady was deported and killed at Ravensbruck, but they did not leave the prison of St Gilles until being transferred to a prison camp at Beverloo when the Allies were already on the horizon.   The guards there did execute some prisoners, but none of the Dutch-Paris resisters.   Instead, they were liberated on September 4, 1944, the day after Brussels was liberated.

Unlike their Dutch-Paris counterparts in France, the men and women of Dutch-Paris in Brussels could celebrate their liberation without the shadow of anxiety for resistance colleagues who had been deported to the concentration camps at the last minute.