Let’s continue our discussion of the shapes of resisters’ daily lives. Today, going underground vs. working from home.

Going underground meant breaking all contact with your family, neighborhood and place of business to devote yourself to full-time resistance work. This was a drastic step because you had to live like an outlaw in your own country. You would most probably have to move around quite a bit. You would have to live under one or several false identities. And you could no longer hold a job to support yourself.

Many young men ended up underground to escape from the draft for forced labor in Germany. Others went underground because the Gestapo was on their heels because of past resistance work.
And others went underground because their illegal work required it. Joining a maquisard camp, for instance, meant leaving your home and family and essentially going underground. There were other resistance jobs, particularly those involving a lot of travel like the leaders and couriers in Dutch-Paris, also required resisters to go underground.

For the most part, however, going underground was a drastic and lonely step that people took only after they “were burned” and needed to leave home to avoid arrest. Staying at home was better because it was familiar and you could revert to your legal identity and legal ration cards. It was far less dangerous, less difficult and less scary.

In fact, there were some jobs that resisters could do only if they remained in their regular lives. For example, town clerks who made false documents for resisters would only have access to the proper forms and information if they continued in their regular jobs at the town hall. The same with hotel owners who allowed resisters and people on the run to stay in their hotels without reporting them to the police, as they were legally obliged to do. They couldn’t provide hotel rooms if they weren’t running the hotel.

Anyone who stayed at home, no matter what illegal work they did, had to live a double life convincing their neighbors and possibly even their own families, that they were the same person as always living the same law-abiding life as always. They also had to live with the fear that they would bring disaster on their family if they were betrayed or followed or captured.

Of course resisters who had gone underground also feared for their families because of the Nazi doctrine of family responsibility by which they punished an extended family for the resistance work of a single member. Vichy had a similar policy. That’s why at least two resistance leaders asked Dutch-Paris to take their children to Switzerland where they would be out of reach of authorities wanting to use them as hostages.

In fact, no matter where a resister slept, he or she was sharing the pillow with danger and anxiety.