Heroic Dutch family hid Jews, saved Allied airmen

This was one of the best interviews I have ever done. I talked to Casey Scheffer about how his family hid two Jews inside their house in a small village for two years, in addition to Allied airmen and other refugees. It's just an incredible story, and they have not received enough recognition for their bravery. God bless the Dutch Resistance.

To read, click on the Wartime Wednesdays link below.

And I urge you to share this column with anyone who might be interested. It's an untold story that deserves to be told.

 

Any one time the Onderduiker organisation was hiding up to 250,000 potential labour draftees and their families who went into hiding - as well as Dutch Jews - and hundreds of downed airmen ...once the routes south through Belgium and France became impassable due to Allied interdiction of the rail system leading up to and after D-Day. In Belgium the escape lines were reduced to accomodating large camps each of dozens of evaders sleeping rough in Belgian forests, for example; as the Allies headed north toward Holland after Paris was liberated, MI9 and the SAS dashed ahead of the advancing front lines to pick these evaders up with the aid of the Resistance before the front line rolled back over them!

The Onderduiker organisation had a very ambivalent relationship with the other main Dutch Resistance groups. They were let down on several occasions by the SOE-run main "resistance".....the group that turned out to be penetrated by and literally run by the Gestapo! They DID liaise with and received funds from the two much smaller resistance networks run by the Dutch government-in-exile, separate organisations from the SOE network...although contact with England was slow and risky; they didn't use radio, the Dutch royalist groups managed to reconnect the Dutch end of one of the undersea telephone links across the North Sea that the Germans thought broken in May 1940!

It's a truly "unsung" war effort; the Onderduikers found and recruited literally THOUSANDS of safe houses around the country...and recuited the assistance of hundreds of loyal Dutch civil servants who issued ration cards, transit papers and passes and identity cards for the Dutch citizens who went into hiding...but still had to be moved around the country - and of course fed!

 

The resistance efforts of the Dutch were remarkable. Thank you for sharing this information. I'm lost in admiration for anyone who would risk their children's lives to stand up for their beliefs.