Lidegaard claims this was because the Danes refused to help the Germans, but the causation might also have worked in the other direction. The central ambiguity is that the Germans warned the Jews and let most of them escape. The story may have ended well, but it is a complex tale. The result is an intensely human account of one episode in the persecution of European Jews that ended in survival. Bo Lidegaard, the editor of the leading Danish newspaper Politiken, has retold this story using astonishingly vivid unpublished material from families who escaped, and the testimony of contemporary eyewitnesses, senior Danish leaders (including the king himself), and even the Germans who ordered the roundups. Neighbors helped families to flee to villages on the Baltic coast, where local people gave them shelter in churches, basements, and holiday houses and local fishermen loaded up their boats and landed them safely in neutral Sweden. The churches read letters of protest to their congregations. When, in October 1943, the Gestapo came to round up the 7,500 Jews of Copenhagen, the Danish police did not help them to smash down the doors. There was no “us” and “them ” there was just us. Danish Jews survived Hitler’s rule in World War II, when other European Jews did not, because Danes regarded their Jewish neighbors as countrymen. Countrymen, Bo Lidegaard’s magnificent book, states its central argument in its title.
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