Stories of the Jews of Denmark
During the first week of my month-long residency in Copenhagen in 2015, I was invited to dinner in a Northern suburb of the city, close to the beach. While noticing how beautiful the coast looked, the friend driving me and the other visitor coming from the USA told us we could see Sweden from where we were, and she added that fishermen in the region saved lots of jews during World War II. We were surprised to hear that since Denmark was a collaborationist government. Our friend added that Danish people are usually very well received in Israel because of these fishermen stories.
Diary belonging to a boy describing the flight to Sweden and his sojourn there (Danish Jewish Museum)
I thought a lot about that conversation in the car ride between this beautiful and chic suburb and the city centre where I was staying. I realised that I knew nothing about Denmark's history during World War II and that I only assumed, because they were collaborating that they must be the "bad guys". Things are of course much more complex, and therefore interesting.
When you put these two facts next to each other, it seems not to make much sense:
Denmark was a collaborationist government between 1940 and 1943.
95% of the Jews of Denmark had been saved during World War II.
I keep thinking about the city I live in, Amsterdam, in the heart of the Jewish neighbourhood, in a house where a Jewish family used to live - all deported and killed in death camps. How come that more than 70% of Dutch Jews disappear into the death camps, while almost all the Jews in Denmark managed to get away safely?
This is one of the many questions raised by Bo Lidegaard in his book Countrymen: The Untold Story of How Denmark's Jews Escaped the Nazis, reviewed by Ian Buruma in The Guardian.
In his review, Buruma highlights important parts of Lidegaard's book such that, contrary to popular myth, King Christian did not "ride his horse through Copenhagen wearing the Star of David, but he did make it clear, as he wrote in his diary, that he considered "our own Jews to be Danish citizens, and the Germans could not touch them". The Dutch Queen Wilhelmina may have felt the same way about Jews in her country, but she never stated it as openly as her Danish colleague, even from her safe base in wartime London."
According to Buruma, Lidegaard explains that "Swedish neutrality and the Danish deal with Nazi Germany were not heroic. But these arrangements provided the necessary flexibility to do the right thing."
The building
The Danish Jewish Museum was designed by Daniel Libeskind, who has also designed the Jewish Museum Berlin. In Copenhagen, Liberskind based his design on the unique circumstance of Danish-Jewish history that the majority of Danish Jews were saved from Nazi persecution by their Danish compatriots during the Second World War. This human involvement is symbolised in the form, structure and lighting of the museum.
The emblem and concept of the museum is the Hebrew word Mitzvah, which can be translated as “obligation”, “deeply felt reaction”, “involvement” or “good deed”. The word Mitzvah represents the generally positive Jewish experience in Denmark and the special experience of being saved, and has become part of the museum’s logo.
Read "The mass escape of Jews from Nazi-occupied Denmark" by Ellen Otzen.
Listen to Bent Melchior on BBC radio, who was 14 years old when his family made the journey to safety in neutral Sweden.
Writer, Literary Translator, Artist based in Amsterdam.
Canan (she/they) publishes The Attention Span Newsletter, taking the time to reflect, to analyse and to imagine our societies through writing, art and culture; and City in Translation, fostering discourse and conversations around the art of translation.