The story may have ended well, but it is a complex tale. The result is an intensely human account of one episode in the persecution of European Jews that ended in survival. Bo Lidegaard, the editor of the leading Danish newspaper Politiken, has retold this story using astonishingly vivid unpublished material from families who escaped, and the testimony of contemporary eyewitnesses, senior Danish leaders (including the king himself), and even the Germans who ordered the roundups. Neighbors helped families to flee to villages on the Baltic coast, where local people gave them shelter in churches, basements, and holiday houses and local fishermen loaded up their boats and landed them safely in neutral Sweden. The churches read letters of protest to their congregations. When, in October 1943, the Gestapo came to round up the 7,500 Jews of Copenhagen, the Danish police did not help them to smash down the doors. There was no “us” and “them ” there was just us. Danish Jews survived Hitler’s rule in World War II, when other European Jews did not, because Danes regarded their Jewish neighbors as countrymen. This is a tense, inspiring story of the resistance to oppression by a united people.Countrymen, Bo Lidegaard’s magnificent book, states its central argument in its title.
A policy of delay and obstruction bought time, which allowed ordinary citizens to organize transport of almost all of the Jews to Sweden. The Danish government, including the king, had advance notice of the Nazi plan. proceeds on two tracks: the Nazi plans for roundup and the Danish plans to defeat it. As points out, this mass rescue was extraordinary, since the population and governments of other occupied nations rarely protected their fellow Jewish countrymen. "One of the few feel-good stories to emerge from the Holocaust was the protection and eventual rescue of the approximately 7,000 Danish Jews by their fellow Gentile Danish citizens, escaping a scheduled roundup by Nazi occupiers. A former diplomat, now the editor in chief of Denmark's leading newspaper, Bo Lidegaard reconstructs the events of this remarkable exodus day by day, quoting from official records and the diaries and documents of families forced to flee, and those who came to their aid. The warning went out to the Jewish community, and over 14 harrowing days, while the government used its limited powers to impede matters in Berlin, ordinary Danish citizens spontaneously protected and hid their Jewish fellows, helping them make a mass escape to neutral Sweden. Denmark, under German occupation in World War II (though with its king and government intact), did something that no other European country attempted learning that the Nazis were about to round up the country's 7,000 Jews for deportation, the king, his ministers, and parliament all agreed that these Jews were Danish citizens first.
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