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.

Three escapees to neutral Sweden, just children at the time, share their journeys.

Henri [Chanoch] Nachman

The message reached us the day after Rosh Hashanah: “The Gestapo is rounding up Jews. Run”

O

ne of the first things I remember is hundreds of German troops marching along the main road in Aarhus, the city where we lived in Jutland, Denmark. I was playing outside, on the corner by the bakery, and my friends called me to get inside, out of the way, because I was a Jewish kid. The soldiers marched past. This was April 1940, when the Germans occupied Denmark, but they didn’t do anything to the Jews.

My father had come to Denmark in 1930 to join a group of chalutzim who were studying farming in the Jutland countryside in order to go to Palestine and make the desert bloom. He came from a very religious family in Gdansk [Danzig] where his father was a gabbai of the community, but he was the black sheep, a Zionist chalutz.

My mother’s family, meanwhile, were more socialist than religious, but they kept the chagim, and they hosted my father when he wanted to spend Rosh Hashanah and Pesach with a Jewish community. My parents married in February 1936, and I was born in Jutland. Although we, too, kept the Jewish holidays, I didn’t know very much about Judaism as a child.

By October 1943, I was six years old and just starting school. There was no synagogue in Aarhus, but my father used to go to blow shofar in the next town, which had a few Jewish families. The people around us more or less knew that we were Jewish, and some of the Jewish families in Jutland had friends in Copenhagen. The message reached us the day after Rosh Hashanah: “The Gestapo is rounding up Jews. Run.”

That day after Rosh Hashanah 1943 we went to the train station in Jutland and boarded a train to Copenhagen. We separated to avoid attracting attention. My parents and my baby brother got on near the front of the train, while the oldest daughter of our good Danish friends who lived in the apartment below us traveled with me and my sister at the back. You couldn’t take much along, either. It would have been far too obvious to take the train laden with suitcases. Even taking diapers for the baby was problematic.

My parents didn’t tell me much about what was going on at the time, but clearly, the underground resistance movement was helping us escape, because at Copenhagen’s main train station, someone waited for our family, and brought us to the assembly point at the city’s central hospital. Around 200 Jewish people were hidden in a big room under the hospital chapel.

The next night we were moved by taxi, or maybe they were private cars. I remember that another man sat in the front seat, and my parents and all three of us children were in the back seat. A head poked in: “Are you all one family?”

My father said “Yes, yes.”