Their families grew increasingly worried as the weeks went by without their loved one returning or sending word. Was the missing person just held up for some reason? Perhaps he or she was sick and in a hospital? Had they even survived the war?

There was not much that someone could do except wait. The Red Cross took down a missing person’s particulars and added them to the catalog of missing persons. They also asked returning deportees who they had seen in the camps, especially who they had seen die.  In Paris it was possible to put a note on a bulletin board at the Hotel Lutetia, which was being used as a clearing house for returning deportees. The hope was that the person or someone who knew them might see the note and send word. For the most part, families had to rely on the kindness of other former prisoners and deportees who had known their loved one and could tell them when and where they’d seen them last or if they’d seen them die.

Many prisoners and deportees did feel an obligation to visit the families of friends to tell them what had happened. But sometimes it took months for that friend to arrive back home and visit the family. Or, if the friend didn’t know how to contact the family, for the friend to see a notice on a bulletin board or in a newspaper asking for information.

At least four Dutch-Paris families waited many months before they found out what had happened to their missing person. In one case, the family found out how their sister and daughter had died because they placed an ad in a newspaper asking for information. In another case, someone who had known the father of the family and saw him die managed to find the family and tell them. In another case the wife of a deported Dutch-Paris man heard a rumor that someone who had been at the same camp was visiting their neighborhood. This was more than a year after the war ended. She went to talk to this man, who had known her husband and was able to tell her when and how he died.

In the saddest case of all, another prisoner told the family that he had seen their loved one enter a factory that was then bombed and burned to the ground. This was already many months after the war and should have provided the answers that they needed. But at the same time, the Soviet government gave the Dutch government a list of names of Dutch citizens who were in the Soviet Union. There was the missing man’s name. This gave the desperate wife hope. She took it to mean that her husband had been liberated by the Soviets and was being held hostage by them in a game of international politics. It took over a year to get the Soviet government to admit that they had spelled the name on the list incorrectly. The widow finally had to admit that her husband was dead.

To this day, the Dutch government has a list of several hundred missing persons from the Second World War because they were unable to establish what happened to those men and women. The war’s tragedies kept unfolding long after if officially ended on 8 May 1945.

The women of Dutch-Paris, for example, were all sent to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück but they were not all kept there.  One was beaten to death by guards. Another was gassed to death. One died of disease and malnutrition in a sub-camp mere days after the Russians liberated her. Some of them were moved to sub-camps that might have been as informal as a group of women being used as slave labor in a factory.

The Dutch-Paris women who were still alive in the main camp at Ravensbrück in April 1945 were rescued by the White Busses organized by the Swedish Red Cross and then returned to Paris after a period of convalescence (except for the courier who married a Swede). That counted as the luxury route in 1945.

Two young women who worked for Dutch-Paris as couriers and guides were arrested, tortured and then deported for their illegal work. They were each removed to smaller camps and set to work as slave labor. When the Soviets started moving into the Third Reich from the east, the SS started evacuating the concentration camps in the path of the battle. This was not out of concern for the well-being of the inmates. They wanted to keep the labor. They set the prisoners on what are known as death marches to camps further west. They shot anyone who could not managed the marches.

One of these Dutch-Paris women was moved from the sub-camp to Buchenwald in February 1945. On April 13, 1945, the SS rounded up the prisoners for another death march to the west. They walked almost non-stop without food or rest and exposed to the rain and cold for ten long days. On the tenth day, our woman and four others escaped from the column. “After many difficulties” they met up with some French POWs who had been captured almost five years earlier. The Frenchmen found the political prisoners uniforms so they could sneak into the POW camp so they could sleep with a roof over their head and have a little bit to eat. But then then the POWs were forced to evacuate. Our woman spent an entire night marching in a downpour but was liberated by American troops the next day – 7 May.

The other young Dutch-Paris courier had been sent to a different sub-camp but was also forced onto a death march. She, too, was liberated by Allied soldiers on 7 May 1945. Neither woman goes into detail about what happened to her after she was liberated, but they were most probably given food and clothing, allowed to rest and then transported to Paris for repatriation.

There were millions of displaced persons in Europe when the Third Reich surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. Some were prisoners of war. Some were forced laborers including men drafted from France to work in German factories or farmers and Ukrainian villagers, some as young as 14, rounded up at gunpoint to work in the Third Reich. Some were Jews who survived the Holocaust. Some were political prisoners who had been deported to the concentration camps. Political prisoner was a capacious definition which included political enemies of Nazism such as Socialists or Communists or even Catholic priests and nuns; resisters of all varieties; homosexuals; Sinti and Roma; hostages taken to terrorize an occupied populace and others. There were also people of all ages who had crossed one or more international borders while trying to escape the battles. “Displaced persons” does not, technically, included people who had left their homes but remained in their home countries.

Obviously all these people did not sit quietly in their concentration camps after Allied troops liberated them waiting for the war to officially end. Many started walking home. The western Allies started arranging transport as soon as they started liberating prisoners in April 1945. They sent liberated prisoners home in long convoys of trucks and on military planes. The home countries attempted to control this return through “welcome centers” where displaced persons were vetted to find collaborators trying to whitewash themselves and given medical exams and perhaps clothing and food.

The return of thousands, even millions, or malnourished and traumatized people had a searing impact on the civilians who had been waiting at home, hoping that their loved ones would return. My father, then a boy of six, vividly remembers seeing truck after truck of forced laborers and prisoners driving through his town. In more than one town in France the sight of returning POWs, forced laborers and prisoners sparked violence against German POWs and collaborators.

The Return also meant the loss of hope for those who were waiting for someone to come home who did not come home.

The end of the Second World War was not all dancing in the streets and celebrations for civilians. It was also deep emotional shock, grief and in some cases more violence.

Wars and especially modern, industrialized wars that involve civilians whether they want it or not, however, do not simply stop because politicians and generals have signed some papers. From the perspective of civilians and European society, 2025 is the 80^th anniversary of a tumultuous year at best.

The war and occupation took different shapes in different countries and even in different regions within countries. So the Dutch commemorate 4 May every year as Dodenherdenkingdag (Remembrance of the Dead Day). This is the day that people line up in silence for hours to walk past a memorial in the dunes near Scheveningen where the occupation authorities executed political prisoners. Other places remember the dead in ways that reflect their own occupation histories and traumas.

Every five years, including this year, the entire country celebrates the Liberation of the Netherlands on 5 May 1944. Maastricht and the southern third of the country were liberated in September 1944 but after the failure of the Allied assault known as Operation Market Garden, the northern two-thirds of the country were locked in a punitive occupation regime. Part of the punishment for civilian support of the Allies in the early fall of 1944 was a deliberate famine inflicted on the civilian population by the occupation authorities.  There was food in the Netherlands, but the German authorities refused to release it from the warehouses. If civilians in the big cities wanted food, they had to trek out to the countryside to get it because the Germans weren’t letting any food be transported into the cities. It was not until the end of April 1945 that the occupation authorities allowed the Swedish Red Cross to unload flour from a relief ship and the RAF to drop crates of food for civilians. Exact numbers are not known, but approximately 22,000 people died of starvation during the infamous Hunger Winter of 1944-45.

Of course many more people were severely affected by the starvation. For example, my father lived in Maastricht but he had family “above the rivers” in the famine zone. In one household only one of his many cousins had the strength to crawl out of the house and ask for help when the Canadians liberated their town.

So the Dutch celebrate the Liberation on 5 May, which for them meant the end of the occupation and the famine, rather than the signing of the surrender on 8 May. They certainly appreciated that the war was officially over. But given their community’s history and trauma, 5 May means more to them.

The family of Suzanne Hiltermann, who played such an important role in Dutch-Paris, has created the Association Dutch-Paris in order to spread the inspiring story of the courageous deeds of the men and women of Dutch-Paris and promote their ideals.

As their first action, the family have initiated and supported the translation of my history of Dutch-Paris – The Escape Line / Gewone helden – into French.  It is now available online and at booksellers in the Francophone world as Dutch-Paris, le plus grand réseau européen de résistance  (see photo of cover below).

They have also been working with the Dutch Embassy in Paris to present the French translation as part of the embassy’s celebration of the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of the Netherlands on 5 May 2025. I am greatly honored to share the story of Dutch-Paris on such a meaningful occasion.

The ADP has more ideas of how to make the story of Dutch-Paris known using the technologies and narrative pathways of the 21st century. You can join and/or support the association by visiting the website www.dutch-paris.com or their helloasso page at www.helloasso.com/associations/association-dutch-paris/collectes/honoring-the-resisters-of-the-dutch-paris-escape-line

But they were not all-knowing or all-seeing and were not correct in their conclusions all of the time. They could cover a lot of that up because they could take hostages and make arbitrary arrests.  But sometimes they needed luck to go their way as well.

For example, a young woman named Jacqueline (born 1922) worked for Dutch-Paris as a guide and courier between Paris and Toulouse. She escorted Engelandvaarders and Allied aviators on the train from Paris and to their Dutch-Paris rendezvous in Toulouse. On these same trips she carried large amounts of cash to pay for the fugitives’ treks over the Pyrenees.  She may also have done similar work for another escape line.

Jacqueline was arrested at her parents’ home in Paris-Neuilly in June 1944 (after the Normandy Landings). While they were there, the Gestapo also arrested her mother (born 1899). They were both deported to Ravensbrück.

Was Jacqueline’s mother part of Dutch-Paris? Yes, in the sense that the German authorities thought she was and punished her for being part of the line.  For that same reason, she appears on the official list of members of Dutch-Paris.

But the documents – which are very incomplete – have nothing to say about what Jacqueline’s mother might have been doing with Dutch-Paris before her arrest.  Interestingly, the documents do agree that she and her husband, Jacqueline’s father, were involved with a different escape line starting in 1942. It’s possible that they shared information with Dutch-Paris via Jacqueline. Resisters often worked for more than one network, possibly without even knowing who they were working with.

So Jacqueline’s mother had broken the occupation laws and was working as a resister. She was not innocent of illegal activity. She just wasn’t punished for the exact crime she’d committed. The Gestapo got a lucky break that she was at home when they went to arrest her daughter.

The Nazis also threatened to kill all the men in a resister’s extended family and deport all the women if a resister aided or abetted evading Allied aviators. More commonly, the Nazis would hold the people of the nearest village or town responsible for an attack on their military personnel. They went into towns and hung the first few dozen men they found by the lamp posts. They herded entire village populations into churches and set them on fire. You, yourself, did not actually have to commit a crime to be punished by the Nazis.

The men and women of Dutch-Paris did not carry weapons. They did not sabotage any rail lines or assassinate any person. They did not do anything to trigger reprisals. Nonetheless, relatives did get swept up and punished because of the illegal work of members of Dutch-Paris.

For example, during the big round up of Dutch-Paris in February and March 1944, the Gestapo arrested Jean Weidner’s sister as a hostage. As leader of Dutch-Paris Weidner was a wanted man with a price on his head. It’s not clear how they knew that his sister Gabrielle worked as a secretary at the Seventh Day Adventist temple in Paris.  They did not know that his other sister was living with Gabrielle at the time.

At the same time as they were rounding up most of the men and women working on Dutch-Paris’s aviator escape line, they arrested Gabrielle and put her in the civilian side of Fresnes prison. Unlike the people suspected of illegal work with Dutch-Paris, who were put in the other side of the prison, Gabrielle was allowed to ask for a blanket from home and to receive food packages and money. Weidner hired a lawyer for her, who had a meeting with a Gestapo officer. The officer was very clear that Gabrielle would be released if her brother turned himself in.

Obviously too many hundreds of other lives depended on Weidner staying out of the hands of the Gestapo for him to even consider turning himself in. Gabrielle stayed in prison and was then deported shortly before the Liberation of Paris to the concentration camp of Ravensbruck.  She died in a sub-camp a few days after the Russians liberated it in early 1945.

In a bittersweet irony, Gabrielle actually did work with Dutch-Paris. She was involved with helping several Jewish families escape the northern occupation zone of France before November 1942. After her brother created the full Dutch-Paris network, she served as a postbox. She was the only person who was likely to know where her brother was and she took messages and held microfilms for the Swiss Way and for agents of the Dutch government in exile.  The Gestapo might have learned a few things from her, but they never asked.

There are also stories of bad luck. Take, for example, a woman we’ll call Mary. She lived in Paris in the neighborhood around the Sorbonne. She knew Brother Rufus and that he was collecting food for fugitives. It’s not clear if she knew what sort of fugitives he was helping or how he was helping them.

One day in February 1944, Mary was walking along the street, quite possibly on her way to pray at the chapel or maybe on her way home, and saw the shocking sight of Brother Rufus in handcuffs being put into a German car by German soldiers. Instead of hurrying on her way, she gawked so long that the Gestapo arrested her as well.

The Gestapo actually released Mary after a couple of hours, figuring that she really was just an innocent by-stander. Then Mary went home. Only to have the Gestapo come pounding on her door late that night because the doorkeeper at Brother Rufus’s convent told them that Mary had told him about Brother Rufus’s arrest.

That was enough to get her sent to the concentration camp of Ravensbrück for a year.

Was Mary a resister? Yes in the sense that the Gestapo thought she was and she spent a year as a political prisoner because of it. But we don’t have enough information about her to know if she belonged to a resistance group of not.

Was Mary part of Dutch-Paris? Yes in the casually auxiliary way of donating food to fugitives being helped by Dutch-Paris. And yes in the auxiliary way of being punished for being part of Dutch-Paris according to the Gestapo, who were fining with the idea of unproven guilt by association.

But she didn’t act like a resister. Anyone else in the line would have hurried away from the sight of a colleague being arrested. Maybe doing an about face and running in the opposite direction would have been too suspicious, but certainly they would have kept walking. And most of them would have found somewhere else to spend the night after an afternoon at Gestapo HQ if they possibly could.

What we can say for sure is that if Mary hadn’t been walking down the street at that exact moment, she would never have been arrested, let alone deported to the concentration camps. She was a woman with a kind heart and terrible luck.

One sort was the courage of couriers and guides who kept moving through dangerous situations with the incriminating evidence of downed aviators or other fugitives by their side.

Joke (pronounced Yo-Ka) Folmer told me about that when I had the great honor of talking to her in Amsterdam in 2016. As a young woman, Folmer escorted hundreds of downed Allied aviators across the Netherlands and into Belgium, where she passed them to other escape lines including Dutch-Paris.  She usually walked and cycled the entire length of the country with men who stuck out in their habits and their inability to speak Dutch. She was eventually and perhaps inevitably caught and deported to the concentration camps.  Fortunately, she survived and returned home.

Joke told me that she used every sense to navigate those journeys, including smell.  She would stand at street corners and sniff the air. The Germans had better quality tobacco than the Dutch civilians did, and the scent of it traveled far. It was one way of locating her enemy.

Joke also told me that there were times when fear threatened to overwhelm her. At those times she had to give herself a stern talking to in order to keep moving forward.

Even for a woman with demonstrably great courage like Joke Folmer, courage is not easy. It can falter. It needs discipline and determination to back it up and shore it up.

Even courage plays out differently for each person, and not just because each person needed to draw on their courage in unique circumstances.  For example, a young Engelandvaarder associated with Dutch-Paris was arrested by German officers and put into a car heading to Gestapo HQ. He found the courage to open the car door, roll out onto the pavement and take off running.  Most probably, adrenaline and the certain knowledge that the Gestapo would not treat him gently gave him sufficient motivation.

That took guts, for sure. But it’s different from the sort of cold-blooded courage that a woman showed in opening her home to strangers for an indefinite period of time. That woman was literally putting her life in the hands of strangers without any compelling reason outside of her own moral code.  Many times, it went fine and no one was harmed, indeed someone was saved.

But not always.   Take the story of a woman we’ll call Madeleine. She was a middle aged nurse who had her own apartment in Paris. In July 1943, someone denounced her by anonymous letter, accusing her of “anti-government sentiment”.  The French police investigated but uncovered no political activity.  She was not part of Dutch-Paris at that time.

A leader of Dutch-Paris recruited her in early March 1944, asking her to find other new recruits for the line. He also asked her to lodge an Engelandvaarder for a week. The man was an officer in the Dutch air force and should have been reliable or at least discreet. He was neither.  Indeed he acted as if his clandestine trip to Spain was a holiday excursion and an opportunity to visit acquaintances and do some sight-seeing. Not surprisingly, he drew the attention of the German authorities, who banged on the door of Madeleine’s apartment very early one day in late March 1944.

Madeleine and her irresponsible guest were both arrested. She was questioned, imprisoned and deported to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück in July 1944. Like other Dutch-Paris women she was extracted from Ravensbrück by the Swedish White Busses and returned to Paris in June 1945. She worked with Dutch-Paris for less than a month but spent over a year as a political prisoner of the Nazis because of the disgraceful behavior of a man she was trying to help.

Out of the approximately 3,000 fugitives whom Dutch-Paris helped, that officer was the only one who is known to have caused the arrest of those trying to help him.