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

Between 1942 and 1945, 300 French and Dutch residents maintained a clandestine "Dutch-Paris" network to hide, supply, and move people—Jews, downed airmen, resisters—across occupied and Vichy France to Switzerland and Spain. In all, 82 network members were eventually arrested, while 16 were tortured and 49 were deported to camps; 27 died, including the young sister of the network's organizer, Jean Weidner. But as a result of their efforts, 1,500 people escaped and another 1,500 were supported in hiding. The participants didn't see themselves as exceptional; they did what they did because they believed it was the right thing to do despite constantly putting their lives at risk. A virtue of this well-researched study is its lack of hyperbole: the narrative is flat, factual. Yet people actually died for what they did here, and the cumulative effect of the narrative is overwhelming. This is a different book from Raul Hilberg's monumental The Destruction of the European Jews, but the approach to truth-telling is similar. Independent scholar Koreman (formerly, history, Texas Tech Univ; The Expectation of Justice) simply documents what happened, providing details and allowing readers to make the connections.