Salute to Denmark and Sweden

This sermon marks the 25th anniversary of the rescue of thousands of Danish Jews from Nazi deportation and probable extermination in World War II. In noting how few people came to the aid of Jews during the Holocaust, Sidney Ballon feels a greater need to recognize the few who who risked their lives to save others.

Their courage [is] all the more noteworthy for their defiance of the cruel, barbarous, and overwhelming Nazi power to save sometimes a large group of Jews or sometimes but a single life. We must remember and be grateful to them for saving to some extent at least the honor of man.

ONE OF THE MAJOR POINTS OF INTEREST in Jerusalem to which tourists are frequently taken is the Yad V’Shem, the memorial to the six million who perished at the hands of the Nazis. Leading up to the entrance of the Yad V’Shem is a long tree-lined path to which has been given the name, The Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles. Each tree along this path has a marker in front of it bearing the name of some individual non-Jew who is known to have defied the Nazis and helped save the lives of Jews. A visit to the Yad V’Shem is a most disturbing and heart rending experience, but the horrifying impact is, perhaps, to a small degree softened by passing, as you go in and come out, all these trees bearing testimony to the fact that there were, indeed, some courageous souls during World War II to whom the brotherhood of man was more than a phrase, and who risked their own lives because they felt a sense of personal responsibility for what was happening to their Jewish neighbors.
 
The Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles contains trees dedicated to individuals of a number of different nationalities, but the nation that deserves to be singled out perhaps more than any other for its historic help to Jews is Denmark, and along with Denmark we must mention Sweden. The reason for this is not to minimize the effort of other people who helped, but the Danes were the only nation to do it as a nation rather than as individuals. There were very few Danes who were Nazi collaborators, and there were very few who were merely indifferent. The Danes rose officially and spontaneously as a people to help their Jewish neighbors when the moment of need came, and the Swedish people to whom the Danes brought their Jews, even though they were neutral in the war, received them willingly with open arms and sheltered them until it was possible to return home or go elsewhere.
 
I make mention of this extraordinary display of humanitarianism tonight because this weekend has been designated by Jews in America as Salute to Denmark and Sweden weekend, and it has been so designated because this month marks the 25th anniversary of the rescue of the Danish Jews.[1]
 
The period of the Holocaust was so horrible a period of Jewish history, so utterly unbelievable not only for the magnitude of the calamity that happened to the Jewish people, but also for the degree of indifference on the part of the rest of the world including our own government here in the United States, as we learned much later, that we Jews perhaps could not be blamed if we tended to overlook the comparatively few in the world who were moved to do something about it, but it ought to be the other way. Because the situation was so unbelievably horrible, we ought all the more to remember those who were our friends. Their deeds become all the more heroic. Their courage also becomes all the more noteworthy for their defiance of the cruel, barbarous, and overwhelming Nazi power to save sometimes a large group of Jews or sometimes but a single life. We must remember and be grateful to them for saving to some extent at least the honor of man.
 
To come to know more about the achievements of these Danes and Swedes and other righteous Gentiles I would suggest the reading of two books which we do have in our own temple library. One is factual and one is fiction, which is however, based on fact. The first was published a number of years ago. It is entitled Their Brother's Keeper and was written by Philip Friedman.[2] It gives us a documented account of non-Jews in every land that fell to Hitler, who helped save the lives of Jews and smuggled them away to safety. It was no simple thing to hide out a Jew. It took ingenuity in camouflaging hiding places, in supplying food, in taking care of personal needs, in keeping babies quiet when Nazi searchers were nearby. Often the cooperation of a number of Christian families was necessary to take care of a single Jew. Yet in Germany itself, in France and Italy, in the Balkans and Greece, in Holland and Belgium, in the Scandinavian countries — there were to be found in all of them non-Jews, farmers, workers, merchants, clergymen who risk their lives in the effort to foil Nazi efforts to solve “the Jewish Problem,”[3] as they put it. Many of these Christians themselves went to the concentration camps and perished as a result of their activities, but a good percentage of the million Jews who survived in Europe owe their lives to the self-sacrificing efforts of these men and women, not all of whom, of course, are known to us.
 
We are remembering this weekend especially the Danes and the Swedes. Who were some of these wonderful people who helped? In the book Our Brother’s Keeper we read for example of Peter Freuchen who a number of years ago was made well known by the $64,000 Question TV program[4]. He owned an island in the Baltic Sea. When World War II broke out he and some friends organized the Society to Help Nazi Victims. They did this even before Hitler invaded Denmark. He personally also engaged in some rescue work of which the rest of his committee was not even informed. German excursion boats would frequently sail into the Baltic near his island. He alone would approach the German boats in a speedboat. It often happened that passengers on seeing him would jump overboard and use this means of escaping from German control. He would pick them up in his speedboat and either take them back to his island or see that they reached Sweden. He stayed in Denmark and joined the underground. He was captured, escaped, and recaptured. The Nazis even took away his wooden leg to make sure he would not escape again.
 
But as I noted a moment ago, the story of Denmark is not merely one of individuals. The whole country was involved. In 1943 the Danish government was ordered to enact anti-Jewish legislation, establish a ghetto, and enforce the wearing of the Jewish badge. King Christian[5] refused and said if the Jews had to wear a yellow star, he would also.[6] The Bishop of Zealand issued a pastoral letter which was read in all the churches of the country, and protested, in the name of Christianity, these humiliating anti-Jewish measures. The entire Danish government was dismissed, and the King dethroned as a result. The Nazis then prepared to do it and worse. They planned on Rosh Hashanah night in 1943 — that year it was the night of October 1 — they planned on that night when they thought they would find most of the Jews together in the synagogue to round them up and deport them to the concentration camps. Out of almost 8,000 Jews that were in Denmark, however, they managed ultimately did take about 475. The secretly leaked out, quite possibly betrayed by a somewhat compassionate Nazi — there seems to have been even some of those — and the Danish underground went into action. The storm troopers, to their amazement, found very few Jews in the synagogues. They were in hiding in the homes of their Danish neighbors. And they were smuggled by sea into Sweden in small fishing boats past the German patrol boats and gunboats who blocked the way. Gerda Bertelsen, wife of a group leader named Aage Bertelsen[7] who engaged in rescue operations, was arrested by the Gestapo and forced to confess her part in the smuggling of Jews, and when asked why she did it replied bravely, "All decent people do."
 
Among the Swedes the two best-known names are perhaps Raoul Wallenberg[8] and Count Folke Bernadotte[9]. A great deal of mystery surrounds the name of Wallenberg. He was a Swedish nobleman and was attached to the Swedish Embassy in Budapest. His letters of protection and forged documents helped to save thousands. When the Russians took Budapest he was for some reason taken under protective arrest and disappeared from view. Later it was established that he died in a Russian prison camp. How and why remains a mystery. It is not known why the Russians should have had anything against a representative of a neutral power who was engaging in anti-Nazi activity, but since the Russians had no love for Jews, it may conceivably had something to do with his pro-Jewish actions.
 
Bernadotte was a member of the royal family of Sweden and a high Red Cross official. He is known for his prolonged negotiations with Himmler[10] and is credited with saving a great many of his prisoners. He too received an ill reward for he was assassinated later on by a fanatic when he went to Palestine as a representative of the United Nations[11] during one of its difficult periods.
 
The second book that you ought to read is the new novel entitled A Night of Watching, by Elliott Arnold.[12] I assure you, you will find it difficult to put down once you start it. It is fiction, but it's events and characters are based on real people and real events. As its story of October 1943 unfolds it has all the suspense and thrills of an exciting spy story or Western thriller, except in this novel good guys also get hurt and hurt bad. We get a glimpse of the underground network, the unlikely people who are part of that underground, the almost full cooperation, not quite of the Danish people as a whole, the ingenuity that was necessary in foiling the Nazis, of successes and failures also. We see the reactions of the Jews themselves, some of whom thought it could not possibly happen that the Nazis would dare do this in Denmark, where Jews were accorded full Danish citizenship. We read of a Kol Nidre service begun in darkness on a beach, interrupted by the machine gun fire of the patrol boat which discovers this attempt to escape and then concluded in the hold of a fishing boat reeking with the smell of fish. We have a picture of the viciousness of some of the Nazis particularly of the SS troopers and of the dismay of other Nazis who could not see the necessity for such inhumane treatment. One Nazi officer cannot stand it all and commits suicide. Others go long unwillingly because ordered to do so. But the leak which gives the Jews a chance to escape comes in the novel from a German; one Nazi officer after he overtakes a Danish fishing vessel full of refugees, pretends that he does not see them and lets it get away. And in the background is the problem of what the necessity to act against the Nazis has done to a group of otherwise quiet, mild, and peace-loving people.
 
Why is it the Danes and the Swedes could have distinguished themselves so magnificently in this most severe test of character and morality, and so many others have failed? Why is it that they at the continuous risk of life and overpowering retribution, dared to be decent and dared to be rescuers when other peoples with no risk at all could have saved many lives chose not to, when the Allied powers including our own State Department, debated and procrastinated and doomed many who might have lived? We do not know, but we do know that in a time when human beings sank to their lowest level of degradation, and when so many individuals and other nations did not stop the German furnaces and gas chambers, there were at least some men of courage — the Danish and Swedish people as a whole among them. The remembrance of their deeds keeps alive in us faith in the potential goodness of man, and we bless them. Dr. Nahum Goldman[13] once said, "People like these have saved the record of the human generation in this period.”
 


[1] The rescue of the Danish Jews occurred during Nazi Germany's occupation of Denmark during World War II. On October 1, 1943, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler ordered Danish Jews to be arrested and deported. Despite great personal risk, the Danish resistance movement, with the assistance of many ordinary Danish citizens, managed to evacuate 7,220 of Denmark's 7,800 Jews, plus 686 non-Jewish spouses, by sea to nearby neutral Sweden. The rescue allowed the vast majority of Denmark's Jewish population to avoid capture by the Nazis and is considered to be one of the largest actions of collective resistance to aggression in the countries occupied by Nazi Germany. As a result of the rescue, and the following Danish intercession on behalf of the 464 Danish Jews who were captured and deported to Theresienstadt transit camp in Bohemia, over 99% of Denmark's Jewish population survived the Holocaust.s

[2] Philip Friedman discusses the rescue of Jews during WWII throughout German-occupied Europe, but especially Poland. Unlike most Holocaust materials written today, Friedman usually puts Jewish suffering within the broader context of non-Jewish suffering.

[3] In 1919, Adolph Hitler issued his first written comment on the “Jewish Problem,” more commonly and euphemistically known as the “Jewish Question,” in which he defined the Jews as a race and not a religious community, characterized the effect of a Jewish presence as a “race-tuberculosis of the peoples,” and identified the initial goal of a German government to be discriminatory legislation against Jews. The “ultimate goal must definitely be the removal of the Jews altogether.”

[4] Lorenz Peter Elfred Freuchen (1886 –1957) was a Danish explorer, author, journalist and anthropologist. He won $64,000 on The $64,000 Question, an American TV quiz-show on the subject The Seven Seas. During World War II, Freuchen was actively involved with the Danish resistance movement against the Germans, despite having lost a leg to frostbite in 1926. He was imprisoned by the Germans, and was sentenced to death, but he managed to escape and flee to Sweden.

[5] Christian X (Christian Carl Frederik Albert Alexander Vilhelm; 1870 – 1947) was the King of Denmark from 1912 to 1947

[6] This incident may be apocryphal, the result of a political cartoon in a Swedish newspaper of the day, specifically on January 10, 1942 by the prominent anti-Fascist Norwegian artist Ragnvald Blix and spread across the USA by Danish-American propaganda efforts, and again later by it’s inclusion in the Leon Uris novel and film Exodus.

[7] Aage Bertelsen (1901 – 1980) visionary, pacifist, civil resister, educator and philosopher, who, with his wife Gerda, was a prime mover of one of the groups, the Lyngby Group, which organized the rescue of Danish Jews into safety in Sweden.
 
[8] Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg (1912 – disappeared 1945) was a Swedish architect, businessman, diplomat and humanitarian. He is widely celebrated for saving tens of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust from German Nazis and Hungarian Fascists during the later stages of World War II.

[9] Folke Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg (1895 –1948) was a Swedish diplomat and nobleman. During World War II he negotiated the release of about 31,000 prisoners from German concentration camps including 450 Danish Jews from the Theresienstadt camp.

[10] Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (1900 – 1945) was was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and one of the people most directly responsible for the Holocaust.

[11] Bernadotte was the United Nations Security Council mediator in the Arab–Israeli conflict of 1947–1948. He was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1948 by a militant Zionist group.

[12] Elliott Arnold (1912 – 1980) was an American newspaper feature writer, novelist, and screenwriter.

[13] Nahum Goldmann (1895 –1982) was a leading Zionist and the founder and longtime president of the World Jewish Congress from 1948 to 1977.