By Charlotte Thalmay
COPENHAGEN –Telling about the Rescue of the Danish Jews during the Holocaust is of course a very personal thing. However, this is a story that has affected almost 95% of the Jewish population of Denmark and is therefore something most of us share in this community.
Denmark was the only occupied country that actively resisted the Nazi regime’s attempts to deport its Jewish citizens. On September 28, 1943, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, a German diplomat, secretly informed the Danish resistance that the Nazis were planning to deport the Danish Jews. The Danes responded quickly, organizing a nationwide effort to smuggle the Jews by sea to neutral Sweden.
Warned of the German plans, Jews began to leave Copenhagen, where most of the 8,000 Jews in Denmark lived, and other cities, by train, car, and on foot. With the help of the Danish people, they found hiding places in homes, hospitals, and churches. Within a two-week period fishermen helped ferry more than 7,000 Danish Jews and 680 non-Jewish family members to safety across the narrow body of water separating Denmark from Sweden.
The Danish rescue effort was unique because it was nationwide. It was not completely successful, however. Almost 500 Danish Jews were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Yet even of these Jews, all but 51 survived the Holocaust, largely because Danish officials pressured the Germans with their concerns for the well-being of those who had been deported. The Danes proved that widespread support for Jews and resistance to Nazi policies could save lives.
My own father and grandmother were laying in the bottom of a fishing boat, hiding from the Germans. My grandfather made sure, that they came to Sweden in safety; unfortunately he didn’t make it himself. It later turned out, that he was a part of the Danish Resistance. In an effort to try to get back family members who were sent off to the concentration camp Theresienstadt, he dressed up as a Nazi and infiltrated their head quarters. Unfortunately a neighbour spotted him, and pointed him out as a Jew. He ended up in Auschwitz and never returned to Denmark….
It has of course influenced my upbringing in Denmark knowing about the dramatic rescue of my family during the war and knowing that there also was a price to pay. I have always been involved in Jewish organisational work, feeling that we must try do make a difference. Creating my own incoming bureau for Jewish tourists in Denmark, I am also trying to spread the fascinating stories worldwide. The Jewish Community of Denmark survived once; now the challenge is to bring it into the next century in spite of increasing anti-Semitism.
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Thalmay is a Jewish tour guide and lecturer based in Copenhagen. She may be contacted at info@jewish-copenhagen.dk