Thousands of fleeing Jews were ferried to freedom in ‘Little Dunkirk’

There have already been numerous events and poignant ceremonies here and around the world, mostly online because of Covid-19, with more happening this evening and for the rest of the week.

And today also marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945, the largest Nazi death camp.

The theme for HMD 2021 is ‘Be the Light in the Darkness’, encouraging reflection on the depths to which humanity can sink, but also reminding the world that countless folk resisted the darkness, themselves becoming ‘a light’, before, during and after genocide.

So as well as beckoning us to online events, the HMD Trust is asking households across the UK to light candles at 8pm tonight, and safely putting them into windows to “remember those who were murdered for who they were and to stand against prejudice and hatred today.”

The HMD Trust stresses, only do this “if you are able to do so safely.”

Some of the brightest lights in the darkness of genocide have been recounted on this page in the past, like German industrialist Oskar Schindler and Kindertransport organiser Sir Nicholas Winton.

Some of the lesser-known lights, also mentioned here, included people like Polish nurse and social-worker Irena Sendler who, with some of her friends, smuggled around 2,500 Jewish children out of the horrendous Warsaw ghetto in 1943. It’s thought that about 400 of the children were rescued from danger by Sendler herself. Though tortured and sentenced to death by the Gestapo she evaded execution and survived the war.

Englishman Francis ‘Frank’ Foley worked for the Foreign Office in Germany but was in fact Britain’s most senior Secret Service spy in Berlin where he saved an estimated 10,000 German Jews after Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in 1933. He even hid Jews in his own home under the noses of the Nazis.

But another heroic story told here before well deserves retelling. There’s a modern-art sculpture in Jerusalem commemorating Danish heroism during the Holocaust - it’s boat shaped, in memory of thousands of Jews ferried in tiny vessels from Nazi-occupied Denmark to Sweden in 1943.

Also commemorated by plaques in Jerusalem’s Denmark Square, the life-saving flotilla has become known as Little Dunkirk, and many cities and towns in Israel have a street or square commemorating the heroism of the Danes.

There’s even a little wooden boat in Jerusalem’s Holocaust Museum that carried its ‘cargo’ of fleeing Jews across the bows of Nazi patrol boats.

The extraordinary mass-escape by sea was made possible because almost the entire population of Denmark’s 8,000 Jews had been tipped off about German plans to deport them to concentration camps.

From little ports and small seaside villages, courageous Danish sailors and boat-owners carried refugees in their rowing boats, canoes, yachts and fishing vessels past German patrols to safety in Sweden.

A mass Gestapo raid on Denmark’s Jews, scheduled for September 1, 1943, left the very surprised German secret police with only several hundred prisoners.

Because a few days earlier, Georg Duckwitz, a German naval attaché at the German embassy in Copenhagen, tipped off Danish Labour party politician Hans Hedtoft about the impending raid.

Hedtoft, later to become Denmark’s Prime Minister, warned the Jewish community to leave. Copenhagen Synagogue’s Rabbi Melchior and his wife Lilian telephoned coded warnings that were relayed around the imperilled Jewish community.

The Rabbi’s son, Bent Melchior, who was 14 years old in 1943, recounted the story some years ago. “My mum started ringing other Jewish families, encouraging them to ‘take a holiday in the countryside’. She told them we were also going away for a few days as we hadn’t had a holiday that year.”

During a New Year service in his synagogue Bent Melchior’s father told his congregation to go into hiding and to spread the word to other Jews. Thousands of Jews fled their homes to the coast where they hid until darkness fell and then met up with their courageous ferry-men.

They were smuggled and transported out of Denmark over the Øresund Strait to Sweden - an hour’s journey on the choppy winter sea, some in fishing boats, others in rowboats or kayaks.

There were German spotter planes in the air, and enemy patrol boats on the water, so the frightened passengers hid below deck or under rugs while their sea-going saviours acted as inconspicuously as they could.

Gustav Goldberger was a nine-year-old boy when he and his parents and three brothers waded through the cold October sea and clambered into the hold of a tiny fishing boat.

The Goldbergers’ voyage took three hours because the boat-owner regularly stopped his vessel to fish, as if he was doing his normal job! Gustav Goldberger claimed thereafter that ‘“reedom smells like fish”!

Leif Wassermann was five years old when his parents, grandparents and younger sister climbed into the dark hull of a boat in the middle of the night. He too remembered the smell of rotten fish. Their boat was regularly boarded by German soldiers but the Wassermanns weren’t discovered. In one night 2,500 Jews sailed to Sweden. Some even swam!

Over a period of about 10 days 95% of Denmark’s Jewish population escaped by boat from the Holocaust.

For details of HMD events visit www.hmd.org.uk