On February 28, 1944,German authoritiesraided an apartment at19 Rue Franklin in Brus-sels and arrested 10 Al-

lied aviators and six members of theDutch-Paris Escape Line. The raid waspart of a round-up of Dutch-Parismembers in Belgium and France. TheGermans’ goal was to disrupt whatsome historians consider to have beenthe most efficient and effective escapeline for Jews, resisters, and downed Al-lied aviators fleeing Nazi-occupied ter-ritories during World War II.

How the Nazis knew where these pi-

lots were hiding is a still a mystery.However, it may not be a mysterymuch longer. The story of the Dutch-Paris Escape Line is being uncovered byWorld War II scholar Megan Koreman,who in 2008 was commissioned by theJohn Henry Weidner Foundation towrite the complete history of Dutch-Paris. This book will be the first fullydocumented account of how thisWorld War II underground escape linewas organized, managed, and sup-ported from the summer of 1942 to thelate summer of 1944.

The Dutch-Paris story will also re-veal how a young Dutch Seventh-dayAdventist textile merchant living inLyon, France, acted on his religious be-

liefs to become one of the most-decorated and honored heroes of thewar. The manner in which this youngman organized more than 300 individ-uals and families to rescue a thousandJews, aviators, and other fugitives is apowerful example of human beingsacting unselfishly and at great risk tothemselves and their families.

The Dutch-Paris Escape Lineevolved from a desire by John HenryWeidner, the son of a Seventh-day Ad-ventist pastor, to assist Dutch nationalsinterned in French refugee camps. Hisvisits to the refugee camps began in1940. By 1942, his work had expandedinto more serious resistance work as he

28 The Journal of Adventist Education • Summer 2013 http:// jae.adventist.org

B Y K U R T G A N T E R

“A Heart Open to theSuffering of Others”

The John Henry Weidner Story

was asked to protect individuals andfamilies who were being pursued by theNazis. He soon established safe routesfor Dutch Jews, resisters, and otherrefugees to safety in Switzerland orSpain. Weidner spoke French, Dutch,and English and, as a natural organizer,was perfectly suited to oversee thecomplex escape route that ran throughthe Netherlands, Belgium, and France.

Weidner’s skills as a rescuerquickly caught the attention ofthe Dutch military attachéGeneral W. A. van Tricht inBern and Willem Visser‘tHooft, general secretary of theWorld Council of Churches inGeneva. With their financialsupport, Weidner began mov-ing more fugitives as well asmicrofilms with informationneeded by the Dutch govern-ment-in-exile in London.

Weidner and the Dutch-ParisLine participants did not dis-criminate among those comingto them for protection. Theyhelped anyone needing hidingor support, regardless of theirability to cover expenses or per-sonal, religious, and political as-sociations. The Dutch-Paris or-ganization itself was composedof hundreds of courageous menand women of various faithsand of many nationalities.

Although the line trans-ported about 150 Allied avia-tors to safety, its primary mis-sion was to protect fleeingJews. This is because Jews werethe ones in the greatest dangerfrom the Nazis. Their onlycrime was having been labeledby the Nazis and by anti-Semites intheir home countries as enemies of thestate. In addition to Jews, the linehelped young Dutch Christian menwho were trying to avoid compulsorylabor service established by the Nazis toreplace Germans recruited for the armyas well as those who wanted to join theAllied armies. The line was also used byresisters who were keeping one stepahead of the Gestapo, including suchnotables as Charles de Gaulle’s brother,Xavier, and the future Nobel Prize win-

ner Gerrit Jan van Heuven Goedhart,aka “Colonel Blake.” Among the res-cued Dutch pilots, few were as famousas Bram van der Stok, who escapedfrom Stalag Luft III, popularized in themovie The Great Escape.

Weidner paid a price for his resist-ance leadership. Under constant sur-veillance by the Gestapo, he was cap-tured twice during his underground

activities. In 1943, for example, Weid-ner was arrested on a mountain trailnear Collonges and taken to Gestapoheadquarters in Lyon, where he wasbrutalized with electric and water tor-ture before being released. The nextyear, he was arrested by the French Mil-ice (paramilitary force), at a café inToulouse, ironically because he wasmistaken for someone else. He was im-prisoned, tortured, and scheduled for

execution by the Germans the nextmorning. His escape was clever, har-rowing, and heroic.

Weidner’s family members also paida price. In an attempt to get Weidner toturn himself in, the Gestapo arrestedhis sister, Gabrielle, on February 26,1944, while she was attending Sabbathschool in Paris. According to Dr. Kore-man, “Gabrielle appears to have been

part of the courier system in-volving the Meyer brothers[Adventist pastors], which cir-culated mail and packagesbetween the occupied and un-occupied zones in France. Shealso prepared and sent pack-ages to Jews in internmentcamps for John Weidner andsheltered fugitives comingthrough Paris. She was a pointof contact for the variousagents in Dutch-Paris, meaningthat she kept and deliveredmessages for them. She alsokept microfilms that onecourier had dropped off for an-other.” In one of the more ago-nizing decisions of his life, JohnWeidner was forced to choosebetween continuing his rescuework or surrendering himselfin exchange for Gabrielle’s free-dom. He chose to continue hiswork. Gabrielle Weidner diedin the Ravensbrück concentra-tion camp in northern Ger-many on February 15, 1945.

How did the line complete somany rescues before being shutdown by the Nazis? In large part,the Dutch-Paris Line succeededbecause of its flexibility andcomplexity. The Line was a clan-

destine “community of rescuers” that in-volved hundreds of people, both helpersand those seeking to escape: Dutch, Bel-gian, French, Swiss, Jewish, Catholic,Protestant, Allied airmen, students,innkeepers, diplomats, and children. Theline utilized hundreds of waypoints:train stations, hotels, homes, mountainhuts, and border crossings. The individ-ual line members were bound togetherby shared resentment of Nazi occupa-tion and brutality, a commitment to dis-cretion, their shared risk, and compas-

29http:// jae.adventist.org The Journal of Adventist Education • Summer 2013

The Dutch-Paris Escape Line spanned five countries, takingrefugees out of countries occupied by the Nazis and smug-gling messages back into those countries.

sion toward those whose lives were indanger.

The Dutch-Paris Line also avoidedthe Gestapo by altering its routes asnecessary. If one branch was threat-ened, the Dutch-Paris Line joinedforces with similar but smaller groupssuch as the Comet or Burgundy lines,which used different routes to the samedestinations.

John Weidner’s recruiting of theCollonges College faculty and staffoffers another insight into how he re-duced the line’s exposure to the Ges -tapo. A number of them were friends ofJohn Weidner: including Roger Fas-nacht, Jean and Anna Zurcher, FredericCharpiot, Jean Lavanchy, and RaymondMeyer and Paul Meyer. Some of themaccompanied refugees from Lyon, An-necy, Annemasse, and St. Julien to theseminary campus near the Swiss bor-der, after which Jean Zurcher tookthem into Switzerland. Zurcher wasboth a teacher at Collonges and a stu-dent at Geneva University. As such, hehad a pass that allowed him to crossthe border daily and sometimes manytimes in a single day. This made it pos-sible for Zurcher to guide some of therefugees into Switzerland using falseidentification documents that he hadobtained in Switzerland. If papers werenot available, he crossed the borderwhere he knew the Swiss guards, manyof whom helped the refugees getthrough the barbed-wire fences.

As with other line members, theCollonges rescuers opened their homesto people trying to escape, providingthem with food and clothing despitethe prospect that their actions could re-sult in the Nazis closing the seminary,confiscating the property, and jailing itsfaculty, or worse.

The Collonges faculty who assistedWeidner were unaware of other Col-longes faculty and staff who were alsoserving the Dutch-Paris Line. Thus, ifone faculty member was arrested, he orshe could not provide the names ofother Collonges faculty members in-volved with the line.

To this day, memories of World WarII resistance activities are vivid at Col-

longes. Now called the Campus Adven-tiste du Salève, the college recently paidtribute to those faculty and staff whoassisted Weidner some 70 years ago. Ata 2006 event, Jewish leaders, commu-nity leaders, faculty, staff, and studentsrecalled the unselfish and principledbehavior of the World War II faculty.The college administration memorial-ized Weidner and the Dutch-Paris lineby dedicating a plaque listing the col-lege’s Dutch-Paris participants.1

With the liberation of Holland andBelgium in 1945 and the return of theDutch government to The Hague, theflow of refugees subsided. The DutchArmy then recruited Weidner to iden-tify Dutch citizens living in France whohad collaborated with the Nazis. Weid-ner pursued these collaborators withthe same zeal and courage that he hadshown in managing the Dutch-ParisLine.

In 1955, he immigrated to the U.S.,where he and his second wife, Naomi,established a chain of health-foodstores in southern California and at-tempted, without much success, toevade the spotlight.

A quiet, modest man, Weidner was“discovered” in 1963 by Haskell Lazare,

director of the Southern Californiabranch of the American Jewish Con-gress, who recognized Weidner as theman who, since the war ended, hadbeen honored by President Trumanwith the United States Medal of Free-dom and had received the MilitaryOrder of the British Empire fromKing George VI, the Order of Orange-Nassau from the Dutch Queen Wilhel -mina, and both the Croix de Guerreand the Medaille de la Resistance fromthe French government.

Lazare contacted the State of Israel,which entered Weidner’s name amongthe Heroes in the Golden Book ofJerusalem and in 1978 recognized Weid -ner as one of the Righteous Among theNations. In 1993, John Weidner washonored at the opening of the UnitedStates Holocaust Museum in Washing-ton, D.C.

Looking back over his wartime activ-ities, John Weidner reflected on why hesubjected himself to this ordeal. He said,“During our lives, each of us faces achoice to think only about ourselves, toget as much as we can for ourselves, orto think about others, to serve, to behelpful to those in need. I believe it is

30 The Journal of Adventist Education • Summer 2013 http:// jae.adventist.org

Weidner’s sister, Gabrielle, was kidnapped by the Gestapo while she attended Sabbath school inthe Paris Adventist Church and taken to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, where she died.

important to develop our hearts, to havea heart open to the suffering of others.”2

The John Henry Weidner Foundationis continuing to honor the courage andcommitment of John Weidner and allthe men and women of the Dutch-ParisLine by commissioning a detailed his-tory of their heroism. Using newlyopened archival files in the Netherlands,Belgium, and France, Dr. Koreman isdiscovering how Weidner and his assis-tants recruited trustworthy line mem-bers and how they produced false iden -tification papers and transit visasnecessary for a journey across five coun-tries. Koreman will describe how Weid-ner and his “lieutenants” developed asystem to provide food, clothing, con-tacts, code words, and instructions tothe refugees specifically designed toavoid detection by the many Nazi andVichy security organizations.

During Koreman’s six months of re-search in various European archives,she found many World War II files onDutch-Paris operations that were re-cently declassified. At the Red Crossarchives in The Hague, for example,she discovered a gold mine of informa-

tion on Dutch-Paris participants whowere arrested and sent to concentrationcamps in Germany and Poland. Thesefiles and discoveries at other Europeanarchives were supplemented by inter-views with surviving line members.Further information came from re-searchers and World War II scholarswho contacted her at her blog (http:// www.dutchparisblog.com).

John Weidner died in California in1994. One of the speakers at his fu-neral, Rabbi Harold Schulweis, found-ing chairman of the Foundation toSustain Righteous Christians, spoke ofthe meaning of the Weidner experienceand the practical role it can play in ourcommunity:

“Confronting goodness may be morepainfully challenging than confrontingevil. It is one thing to study and con-demn the sadistic behavior of a KlausBarbie but quite another to study andacknowledge the rescue behavior of aJohn Weidner. The latter presents us witha hard mirror.

“Would I rescue a pregnant woman,a hungry or homeless child, an aged,frightened couple—provide them withfood and shelter, dispose of their refuse,and care for them in their sickness—knowing that doing so might bring disas-ter upon my family from Nazi pursuersand their informers?

“The rescuer’s goodness shakes thefoundations of my claims to virtue. Thebehavior of flesh-and-blood rescuerscompels me to think long and hard aboutmy own goodness and to imaginativelyrehearse my choices in analogous situa-tions.”3

Ordinary Heroes: The Dutch-ParisLine is scheduled to go to the publishersthis fall. You can play a role in its com-pletion. Should you have informationabout those who served on or were res-cued by the line, please contact Dr.Megan Koreman at her blog site (http:/ / www.dutchparisblog.com). You canalso learn more about the WeidnerFoundation, the Weidner Archives, andthe Weidner Chapters at U.S. collegesand universities by going to the foun-dation Website at http://www.weidnerfoundation.org.

The entire 100-box Weidner Ar -

31http:// jae.adventist.org The Journal of Adventist Education • Summer 2013

Above: John Weidner and other members of theDutch-Paris Escape Line being interviewed for a1964 Dutch telecast.

Right: A gift from his father, this Bible providedJohn Weidner with comfort and direction duringthe Dutch-Paris experience. It is now housed atthe Hoover Institution at Stanford University,along with 11 linear feet of Weidner’s personalcorrespondence and his personal library.

Weidner receives one of the many medalsawarded for his humanitarian service dur-ing the Holocaust.

32 The Journal of Adventist Education • Summer 2013 http:// jae.adventist.org

JAE Continuing Education Credit OptionsBible Doctrines, Parts I, IIHermeneutics The Philosophy of Adventist

Education, Parts I, II, IIISpirit of Prophecy, Parts I, II, IIIDenominational History, Parts I, IIAdventist Health Message, Parts I, II

Andrews University Interactive Online Courses

Philosophy of Adventist EducationDoctrines of Adventist FaithAdventist History & Prophetic HeritageFit for Life – Adventist HealthMore undergrad and grad options; andGriggs Challenge Exams

circle.adventist.org

Adventist Teacher

Adventist Teacher

Adventist Teacher

Summer 2013 Options

Summer 2013 Options

Summer 2013 Options

chives collection is now housed at theHoover Institution at Stanford Univer-sity in California, which contains oneof the world’s largest collections ofWorld War I and World War II docu-ments and is an important resource forhistorians and researchers.

Finally, you can hear and see JohnWeidner in a 1967 documentary pro-duced by Dutch documentarian DickVerkijk by going to YouTube and typ-ing in Meer dan 1080.

Kurt Ganter, Ed.D.,is the Executive Di-rector of The JohnHenry WeidnerFoundation. He hasserved as an educa-tor and health-careexecutive. He lives

in Phippsburg, Maine.

REFERENCES1. Information on the role of Collonges in the

Dutch-Paris Escape Line from the January 2011Monthly Report to the Weidner FoundationBoard of Directors by Megan Koreman.

2. Quoted in Kirsten Renwick Monroe, TheHand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral ChoiceDuring the Holocaust (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2004), p. 217.

3. Cited in Samuel P. Oliner, The AltruisticPersonality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (NewYork: The Free Press, 1988), Foreword, p. xi.

For Additional ReadingDe Graaff, Bob. Stepping Stones to

Freedom: Help to Allied Airmen in theNetherlands During World War II. Am -sterdam: Geert van der Meulen, 2003.

De Jong, Louis. The Netherlands andNazi Germany. Cambridge, Mass.: Har-vard University Press, 1990.

Gildea, Robert. Marianne in Chains:Daily Life in the Heart of France Duringthe German Occupation. New York: Pic-ador, Pan Macmillan, 2003.

Monroe, Kirsten Renwick. The Handof Compassion: Portraits of MoralChoice During the Holocaust. Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Otis, Sherri Greene. Silent Heroes:Downed Airmen and the French Under-ground. Lexington: University Press ofKentucky, 2009.

�

HE UPHOLDS THE CAUSE OF THE OPPRESSED ANDGIVES FOOD TO THE HUNGRY. THE LORD SETSPRISONERS FREE, THE LORD GIVES SIGHT TO THEBLIND, SUSTAINS THE FATHERLESS AND THE WIDOW,BUT HE FRUSTRATES THE WAYS OF THE WICKED