My paternal grandparents, Andre and Othla Andersson, were Danes who had moved from Copenhagen to the United States. They become naturalized citizens of the United States in the mid 1920’s. They were living in Warren, Pennsylvania when my mother was born on February 8, 1927. When my mother was a child, sometime in the 1930’s, they moved to the borough of Queens in New York City, where my mother attended one of the public elementary schools. I’m not sure why, or exactly when, but they decided to go back to Denmark. I believe that they went back because there was a job at a leather goods store for my grandfather in Copenhagen, and work was hard to find during the Great Depression.
Not long after they resettled in Copenhagen, in September of 1939, the Nazi’s invaded Poland, starting Word War II. Shortly after that, on April 9, 1940, Hitler’s forces occupied Denmark. The Danes rightly knew, I believe, that overt, formal military resistance would be disastrous, so the German occupation was virtually unopposed. At least it appeared to be. Behind the scenes, though, there was a robust Danish resistance that produced one of the most famous events in modern Danish history.
The following is from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website article entitled, “Rescue in Denmark.” (https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/rescue-in-denmark)
“Denmark was the only occupied country that actively resisted the Nazi regime’s attempts to deport its Jewish citizens. On September 28, 1943, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, a German diplomat, secretly informed the Danish resistance that the Nazis were planning to deport the Danish Jews. The Danes responded quickly, organizing a nationwide effort to smuggle the Jews by sea to neutral Sweden. Warned of the German plans, Jews began to leave Copenhagen, where most of the almost 8,000 Jews in Denmark lived, and other cities, by train, car, and on foot. With the help of the Danish people, they found hiding places in homes, hospitals, and churches. Within a few weeks, fishermen helped ferry some 7,200 Danish Jews and 680 non-Jewish family members to safety across the narrow body of water separating Denmark from Sweden.”
The Danish effort to save their Jewish friends and neighbors was a heroic one, but the Danes who smuggled them out never considered themselves to be heroes. When asked about the event, they would simply say that it was just the neighborly thing to do at the time. But they truly were heroes. And one of those heroes was my grandfather. Morfar was an excellent swimmer – in fact, I still have a couple of the medals he won in swimming competitions. The boats that participated in the rescue came as close to shore as they could, but there was still some water between those boats and the people waiting on the shore. Many of those people couldn’t swim. So my Morfar assisted them, holding them above water as he swam with them out to where the boats were waiting. He truly was a hero.