Jean Michel Caubo

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Jean Michel Caubo (actually Johannes Michael Caubo ) (born April 28, 1891 in Maastricht , † February 13, 1945 in Dautmergen ) was a Dutch resistance fighter during the Second World War .

Youth and work

Caubo was born as the son of the community police officer Harrie Caubo and grew up in Schin op Geul, a village in what was then the municipality of Valkenburg-Houthem . He took up a job with the Dutch Railways and eventually became “Chef Restaurateur” on Wagons Lits ' international Amsterdam-Paris train when the war broke out. At that time he had been living in Paris for 20 years because of his work and therefore used the French first name Jean Michel.

resistance

Beginning

He was involved in the resistance from the beginning of the war. He had already started informally to help people on the train who had fled Germany. He later joined the Dutch-Paris network , which organized escape routes to bring people from the occupied territories to safer places such as Switzerland and Spain. The group was led by a Dutchman with a textile shop in Lyon , Johan Hendrik Weidner . These included the Dutch Salomon Chait, Herman Laatsman, Larremans, Lejeune, Benno Nijkerk, Jacques Rens, Aan de Stegge, Veerman and Wisbrun. The group was able to save around 1080 people, including 800 Dutch Jews and more than 112 crashed Allied pilots. Caubo's task was to accompany these people to France via the Amsterdam-Paris train connection.

In Paris

When the night trains stopped running due to the war, Caubo was appointed chief officer at the Gare du Nord station in Paris . He had his own office and was responsible for the timetables and departure times. The station was and is a terminus. If you wanted to travel further south from here, you had to go through the city to another train station. His office became a focal point for refugees, from which he helped them get past the controls. His wife Marie Schenk from Luxembourg, like her two sons, was involved in the resistance work. The sons guided the refugees on.

arrest

Following the arrest of a member of the resistance group in February 1944, Caubo and his family were also arrested. At home, the whole family was received by a special French police unit and interrogated in their barracks. His wife Marie was able to destroy important documents unobtrusively. After three days, she and the children were allowed to return home. Caubo was taken to the Fresnes transit camp and from there to Compiègne , where he was heavily interrogated by the Germans. During his stay, Paris was heavily bombed. As a result, his wife suffered a heart attack, to which she succumbed on April 21, 1944. One of his then sixteen-year-old sons went to Compiègne, where he was allowed to speak to his father for five minutes to tell him about the loss of his wife. Caubo, who was flanked by two SS men with submachine guns, listened to his son and said, “Keep your trust. After the war we will solve everything. ”After that he was taken away, and that was the last his family heard from him.

Captivity and death

Caubo ended up in the Dautmergen concentration camp via the Natzweiler-Struthof , Dachau , Ottobrunn and Neuengamme concentration camps . This was a so-called external command of Natzweiler. Here Caubo survived for almost another year in degrading and cruel conditions. On February 13, 1945, he finally succumbed to the combination of assault, malnutrition and forced labor.

family

Caubo was married to Marie Schenk (1895–1944) from Luxembourg. They had three children together, two sons (twins born in 1927) and a daughter (born in 1934). The son Josy was killed on July 21, 1951, the day before his planned marriage, in an airplane accident in the area of ​​Le Vésinet near Paris. Henri emigrated to the USA in 1957, where he died on October 12, 2008 at the age of 81. The daughter married in Belgium, where she was taken in by relatives.

Posthumous awards

After the war, Caubo were posthumously recognized for his resistance work in France, Great Britain, America and the Netherlands:

His family tried three times to nominate him for Yad Vashem , but it was not accepted. It has not been proven that he knew he was saving Jews.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Family website
  2. ↑ Photo of the certificate on the family website
  3. ↑ photo
  4. ↑ photo
  5. ↑ photo
  6. ^ Testimony from son Henri, how they knew if they were Jews or Allies. Additional information on the family website caubo.com

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Caubo, Jean Michel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Caubo, Johannes Michael (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch resistance fighter during World War II
DATE OF BIRTH April 28, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Maastricht
DATE OF DEATH February 13, 1945
Place of death Dautmergen