Danish resistance in WW2

[swiss-cheese]

Exhibit recalls Nazi-era resistance and the many smuggled to safety

By Nancy Bartley
Seattle Times staff reporter

For many Danish Americans, childhood memories include the sound of sirens, the drone of airplanes and Nazi soldiers on the hunt for 7,000 Danish citizens to haul away to concentration camps — Denmark's Jews.
While other European countries developed networks for spiriting Jews to safety, perhaps no other nation was as single-minded about it as Denmark, where Jews were friends, neighbors and, most of all, fellow Danes.

"What's unique is that the Danish people saw their Jewish citizens as Danes, and so they didn't see themselves as separate, and thus were not going to allow their citizens to be harmed," said Laurie Warshal Cohen, co-executive director of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center in Seattle.

This month, the Holocaust Center and the Northwest Danish Foundation are presenting "A Living Wall," an exhibit of photographs and other documents illustrating the rescue of Jews by Danish citizens.

The exhibit is at the University of Washington's Odegaard Undergraduate Library.

The persecution of Danish Jews began around 1943 and was soon followed by Denmark's rescue efforts: Fishermen and farmers, housewives and shopkeepers all banded together to hide Jews about to be deported to German concentration camps. The Danes smuggled them into neutral Sweden instead.

They were tucked beneath fishing tackle and catches of herring, hidden in blankets and in the hulls of boats. Though they risked certain death if discovered, the Danes were not deterred — 6,000 Danish resisters were themselves deported to concentration camps, some dying there.

'A Living Wall'


The exhibit runs through next Saturday at the Odegaard Undergraduate Library on the University of Washington campus, according to the co-sponsoring Holocaust Education Resource Center, which lists the hours for public viewing as 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday. The library is open 24 hours daily for UW students, staff members and faculty.


"The level of anti-Semitism was almost nonexistent in Denmark," said Ilana Kennedy, the Holocaust Center's education-outreach coordinator.

At the Odegaard library last week, Bierte Geijsbeek of Kent spoke with a group of visiting fifth-graders from Stevenson Elementary School in Bellevue who are only a few years older than she was when the war began. She was living in Denmark at the time.

"I was 6 years old," she told the children. "I saw the planes. They were German. My father looked up and said, 'They have arrived.' "

Her father was among the Danish resisters helping with the rescues.

One time a Gestapo agent came to the house posing as a Jew seeking help. Her father crafted an escape plan.

But before the Nazis could set their trap, the agent's identity was exposed and he was killed by Danish resisters.

Several weeks later, a Nazi soldier came to the house asking for her father, but her mother lied and said he was not home. "We had no idea how close a call it was," Geijsbeek said. They later learned her father had been on a list to be executed.

Scott Ryan Moore, executive director of the Northwest Danish Foundation, saw the exhibit, produced by the Project Judaica Foundation in New York, and brought it to Seattle.

The exhibit has stirred old memories, including those of Nina and Georg Pedersen of Magnolia, whose remembrances were added to the exhibit.

Pedersen, the son of a fisherman who arranged rescues, remembers the night a German soldier friendly to the Danes tapped on the window of the family home and told his father, "Take your wife and children and run. Don't ask any questions." The family escaped to safety.

At the exhibit last week, the fifth-graders asked Geijsbeek a variety of questions — from why she thought Hitler hated Jews to why Denmark was different from other countries.

"They (Jews) were our friends and neighbors," she said.

And they had assimilated — unlike in Poland, where many Jews were ghettoized.

"I think it was really neat that they risked their lives to help strangers," Jessica Cheng, 9, said afterward.

"I think it's really amazing a country can work together like that," said Erica Valle, 11.

There is no exhibit like "A Living Wall," Cohen said. "This is a story in which a small group of people acted heroically, and lessons like this go far beyond the Holocaust because they are lessons for humanity."

Some 500 Jews were deported from Denmark to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Cohen's favorite photograph in the exhibit is of the buses Denmark sent to the concentration camp to bring its citizens home.

Unlike surviving Jews who returned to countries to find their homes had been ransacked, many who returned to Denmark found their neighbors had cared for their homes, pets and possessions.

[cold_korn]

The poeple of Denmark fought a war not wish by thier King whom handed thier country to Hitler. Also the king of Denmark handed over Iceland and Greenland to the U.S. prior to their fall to the Nazis