I had a surprising conversation with my 14 year-old son about the book he’s reading for school: Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. The most interesting part went like this:
My son : “Romeo was the bad guy.”
Me : “What?”
My son : “He murdered two people and then he killed himself, so….” (shrug).

All the times that I’ve read that play or seen it performed in its many variations, I have never thought of Romeo as the bad guy. But when you put it like my son did, I can see his point.
Dutch-Paris is open to a similarly broad range of interpretations. The prevailing opinion among readers and directors is that Romeo is a tragic, romantic hero, a star-crossed lover. The prevailing opinion today about Dutch-Paris is that their efforts to rescue the persecuted from the Nazis were heroic and worthy of admiration. But there’s at least one 9th grader who thinks that Romeo was nothing but a cowardly murdered who ended by taking his own life without examining the facts first (ie Juliet was sleeping, not dead).

During the war, the German occupation authorities and their collaborators labelled resisters as “terrorists”. They claimed that every reprisal that they themselves took was the sole responsibility of the resisters, not of themselves even though they pulled the triggers or set the villages on flame. It was not uncommon for the Germans to execute 50 or more local people who they knew were innocent as reprisal for the resistance killing of a single German soldier.

Because of this intransigent and brutal response to acts of resistance by the occupation authorities, there were plenty of people who thought that resisters were reckless and irresponsible. There were also some who agreed with Nazi social policies and did not think that rescuing Jews was a good thing to do. There were other people who felt that resisters were nothing but lawless vigilantes who had no right to take matters into their own hands. Even if such people did not favor the occupation, they wanted the rule of law to be observed no matter who possessed the authority of the law at the time.

Today, of course, we celebrate the resistance and those who supported them, and rightly so. But it is good to remember that they were not necessarily treated as heroes in their own time. And it is always good to remember that no matter how self-evident something seems to us, there will be other people who interpret it differently.