Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 24, 1994 TAG: 9404240071
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Arizona Republic
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It was 1944, and the 23-year-old American pilot had been shot down over Holland. Members of the Dutch Resistance rescued him and stashed him in an attic cubbyhole when the Germans came looking.
Murray, who lives in Phoenix, was one of about 4,000 Allied airmen saved by Resistance "helpers." He owes his life to the people who hid him for seven months.
"We call them the real heroes of the war," Murray said. "They risked their lives to save us. There were thousands of them, but no way to know how many."
Several trips to reunite helpers and the servicemen they saved are planned this year and next around the 50th anniversaries of two of the key dates in World War II.
D-Day, June 6, 1944, was when Allied troops invaded Western Europe. V-E Day, May 8, 1945, was the day the Germans surrendered.
One member of the French underground, Leslie Atkinson, arranged the reunion trips.
In the worst days of the war, he said, "it was raining aviators."
The Germans shot down half a dozen planes a night near Atkinson's hometown on the English Channel, and he helped rescue the survivors.
Atkinson, now 73, has to be coaxed into talking about his years in the French Resistance.
He recalls one American pilot who bailed out when flak brought down his plane. Peasants squirreled away the man in a granary, burrowed into the wheat. Germans combed the village but couldn't find him.
Atkinson's mother treated the pilot's head and leg injuries, and Atkinson retrieved the body of the copilot from the wreckage. Villagers held a funeral Mass, buried the copilot in the local cemetery and put flowers on the grave.
"The Germans were furious," Atkinson said.
Another young soldier, not yet 20, was sent to hide on a farm. When the Gestapo showed up to search the place, the quick-thinking farmer jumped out of bed and put the American in his place. The soldier lay stiff as a board, not daring to move a muscle - less from fright than at the embarrassment of being under the covers with someone's wife.
The downed airmen often were moved every three or four days until they could be sent through the underground railroad to safe countries like Spain, Switzerland or England.
Helpers smuggled the pilots out of the country on regular trains, dressing them in working-class clothes, sometimes having them pretend to be deaf and unable to speak. Others slumped drunkenly while French companions did the talking for their soused "brothers."
When the Gestapo infiltrated the Holland underground's escape routes, helpers were told to hide the airmen rather than risk smuggling them out.
So Murray became Jan Smit, a deaf mute who milked cows on a farm. His Dutch name was carved on the wooden shoes his helpers gave him to complete his disguise. Those shoes now hang on a wall in his family room, along with a picture taken in the square of the village on the Fifth of May, Holland's liberation day, three days prior to V-E Day.
For the celebration, Murray shed his milkman's clothes and again donned his flight suit. And the biggest smile of all.
by CNB