Between Denmark and Sweden there is a strait called the Oresund. At its narrowest it is about fifteen kilometres across, and on a clear day you can see the other side.
Sweden was neutral. Denmark was occupied.
In October nineteen forty three, something happened across that stretch of water that has no real parallel anywhere else in occupied Europe. Around seven thousand two hundred people were taken across it in small boats, at night, over roughly three weeks, by fishermen and by anybody else with anything that floated.
It amounted to almost the entire Jewish population of Denmark.
Denmark's occupation had been unlike anywhere else's, and the reason is unflattering to everybody.
Germany invaded in April nineteen forty and the country was overrun in about six hours. Rather than fight a hopeless war, the Danish government negotiated. Denmark kept its king, its parliament, its courts, its police and its army, in exchange for supplying food to Germany and not making trouble.
German propaganda called it a model protectorate. Plenty of Danes at the time and since have called it something less comfortable.
But it had one consequence that mattered enormously. Because the Danish government remained in place, Danish law remained in place, and Danish law did not distinguish between Jews and anybody else. There were no racial laws in Denmark. Jewish Danes were not registered, not marked, not excluded from professions, and did not wear a star.
The arrangement broke down in August nineteen forty three. Sabotage and strikes had been growing, and Germany demanded that the Danish government impose the death penalty on saboteurs. The government refused, and resigned instead. Germany took direct control.
And with the Danish government gone, the thing that had been prevented for three years was now possible.
The order came at the end of September. The roundup was set for the night of the first of October, which was chosen deliberately because it was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, when families would be at home together.
Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz was a German shipping attache in Copenhagen. He was a member of the Nazi party. He had been in Denmark for years, spoke the language, and knew Danish politicians well.
On the twenty-eighth of September he went to a leading Danish social democrat, Hans Hedtoft, and told him the date.
There is no simple explanation for why. He had tried, through official channels, to get the order stopped, and failed. He flew to Sweden and, on his own initiative, asked whether Sweden would take refugees. Then he told the Danes.
Hedtoft went straight to the head of the Jewish community. Word went out that afternoon and that evening.
On the morning of the twenty-ninth of September, the acting chief rabbi in Copenhagen, Marcus Melchior, stood up in front of his congregation and told them there would be no service.
He told them what was coming, and when, and that they must leave their homes that day, go to friends, go to anybody who would take them, and that they must tell every Jewish person they knew and ask them to pass it on again.
The congregation was about a hundred and fifty people. By the end of the day, through nothing but people telephoning and knocking on doors, a very large proportion of the eight thousand Jews in Denmark knew.
When the German police came on the night of the first of October, they went to addresses and found empty flats. They arrested a little under three hundred people out of eight thousand.
The warning had spread in a way that no organisation could have arranged. A hospital porter telephoned a name from a directory. A shopkeeper closed early and walked round to a customer's flat. An ambulance driver went street by street. Almost none of these people knew each other, and almost none of them were in any resistance movement.
The rest were in cellars, in spare rooms, in hospital wards under invented names, in summer houses along the coast, and in churches.
Hiding is temporary. The problem now was moving several thousand people across a strait.
There was no organisation for this. There was no plan. What happened was that hundreds of separate small groups improvised the same solution at once, in coastal towns all along the Danish shore: Gilleleje, Snekkersten, Dragor, Humlebaek.
Fishermen took people out. So did anybody with a boat. People were hidden in fish holds, under nets, in the bottoms of rowing boats. Crossings were made at night, in autumn weather, often heavily overloaded.
Doctors at Copenhagen hospitals hid families in wards and then moved them in funeral processions and ambulances, on the reasonable calculation that nobody stops a hearse. One hospital is estimated to have passed hundreds of people through in this way.
In the town of Gilleleje, some eighty people were hidden in the loft of the church. They were found and arrested, and that failure is remembered there as sharply as the successes.
The Danish police, still Danish, were a considerable help. Officers looked the other way, warned people, and in several coastal towns actively obstructed the searches. So did a good many ordinary German soldiers, who had been in Denmark for three years, had local girlfriends, and had no appetite whatsoever for this particular job.
Sweden, on the third of October, announced publicly that it would receive all Danish Jews. That announcement mattered enormously, because it turned a desperate gamble into a destination.
Now the part that gets left out of the tidy version. A great many of the fishermen charged money, and some of them charged a great deal of it.
The figures that survive vary wildly, from a modest sum to more than a year's wages for a single crossing. Wealthy families paid for themselves and often for others. Committees were formed in Copenhagen to raise money for those who could not pay, and Danes who had never met the people concerned gave to it.
Historians have argued about this ever since. Some of it was straightforward profiteering. Some of it was a man risking his boat, his livelihood and his freedom, with a family to feed, and pricing that risk. Both were happening at once, in the same harbours, on the same nights.
What is not in dispute is what happened afterwards. When the Danish Jews came home in nineteen forty five, they came back to their houses, and to their shops, and to their furniture.
Neighbours had paid the rent. They had watered the plants and fed the cats and kept the businesses running. There are many separate accounts of families opening their own front door to find the place clean and flowers on the table.
Of the roughly four hundred and seventy who were caught and deported, the Danish authorities never stopped asking after them, demanding to know where they were and insisting on inspections. Almost all of them survived, and that is generally credited to the fact that a government kept making a nuisance of itself.
You may have heard that the King of Denmark wore a yellow star through the streets of Copenhagen in solidarity. It is a lovely story and it is not true. It never happened, because Danish Jews were never made to wear one, which is the more important fact and the reason the story got invented.
Duckwitz, the German who leaked the date, was never punished. After the war he returned to Denmark as West Germany's ambassador, which is an extraordinary thing to think about. He was named Righteous Among the Nations in nineteen seventy one.
The Danish resistance, unusually, asked that its members not be honoured individually for the rescue. Their position was that it had been a national act rather than a series of heroic ones, and Yad Vashem honoured the Danish resistance as a group at their request.
Here is something to think about tonight. In most of occupied Europe, hiding a neighbour meant risking your life. In Denmark it mostly meant risking a great deal less than that, and almost everybody did it, and in other countries far fewer people did. How much of being brave depends on what it costs?