ESCAPE AND EVASION
DURING WORLD WAR II, THOUSANDS OF ALLIED AVIATORS CRASHED OR parachuted into Occupied Europe. A number of escape-and-evasion networks helped to hide them and send them safely back to their bases in England. Thousands of Europeans risked their lives by hiding the airmen in their homes, providing false identity papers, and smuggling them by sea to England or across the Pyrenees to Spain. Between 1942 and 1944, more than three thousand British and American downed flyers successfully evaded capture with the help of an unknown number of ordinary citizens, who risked being shot or sent to a concentration camp.