Megan Koreman. The Escape Line: How the Ordinary Heroes of Dutch-Paris Resisted the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe.

Abstract

As we learn in Megan Koreman’s The Escape Line: How the Ordinary Heroes of Dutch-Paris Resisted the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe, during the Second World War, “Dutch-Paris” was one of the most important and also most successful underground resistance networks in Western Europe. Members of this network provided support to Jews, resistance fighters, Allied pilots, and prominent individuals who had to stay out of the hands of the German occupier by escaping from the Netherlands, Belgium, and France to Switzerland or Spain. This underground network was large and highly efficient. It comprised over three hundred members who eventually saved over one thousand people, most of them Jewish refugees from the Netherlands and downed Allied pilots (26–27). The countermeasures of the German occupier were outright deadly. During the war, half of the network’s members would be arrested and many of them died in German prisons or did not survive...