From Diana Vance

Monroe

To the Editor:

I would like to tell about the most daring rescue of the Jews during World War II. While Hitler’s Gestapo waged fear over most of Europe, the Danish people retained their humanity and rescued its Jewish population even though Denmark had been occupied by Hitler’s army since April 9, 1940. 

It all began in August 1943 when Georg Duckwitz, a German diplomat stationed in Copenhagen, alerted both the Jewish community and the Danish underground that the Gestapo will come on October 1, 1943 and round up all Danish Jews and deport them to concentration camps.

It was a moment when ordinary people risked themselves to help others. This was true of every level of Danish society from fisherman who ferried Jews to safety in neutral Sweden under the cover of darkness to King Christian X who visited Copenhagen’s main synagogue in an act of solidarity and who refused to be complicit with the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

From August to October the Danish people opened their homes, hospital basements, hotels, any place that had room to hide the Jews until night fall. Some without extra rooms brought over bread and butter and any food they had. The purpose was to get the Jews to the coast. There fisherman would take them by boat to navigate the mile or so to neutral Sweden.

One man remembered at dusk he turned around for one last glimpse at Denmark only to see the three people who offered him safety kneeling in the sand with folded hands in silent prayer. 

The Danish people came to symbolize a force of goodness in a world gone mad. It is also a story of a people who proved it is possible to make a difference and refused to see a minority as people who do not belong. Seven thousand Jews were rescued and that gives us pause to recall the letters on white supremacist shirts lettering six million more and the word Auschwitz on January 6, 2021.