Elderly Danish Jews relive the night they were rowed to safety
A narrow waterway between occupied Denmark and neutral Sweden was the escape route for 95 percent of Danish Jews. In that famed rescue mission aided by local authorities together with Danish underground resistance, 7,200 Jews were saved, and some of them are still around to share their memories of those frightening nights
AS Hitler’s Third Reich moved through the European continent, destroying countless Jewish communities, the Jews of Scandinavia were also in Nazi sights. In October 1942, the Gestapo rounded up all the Jews they could find in the tiny community of Oslo, Norway, and deported them to Auschwitz, where almost all of them were murdered.
But the fate of the Danish Jews was completely different.
For the first three years of the German occupation, this 8,000-strong Jewish community remained untouched. In October 1943, when the Gestapo planned to round up Denmark’s Jews, a tip by a German diplomat in Copenhagen gave the Jews a window of escape: Over a period of two weeks, about 7,200 Jews and some 700 of their non-Jewish relatives, assisted by local authorities and the Danish underground resistance movement, were ferried by fishermen from the village of Gilleleje and others across several narrow waterways that separate Denmark from neutral Sweden. About 500 Jews were caught in the Nazi raids and deported to Theresienstadt, but most survived the two years of their incarceration.
Create a free account to keep reading.
