A Reminder of Five Million Who Died
LICHTBLAU, JOHN H.
A Reminder of Five Million Who Died October '43. By Aage Bertelsen. Putnam. 246 pp. $3.00. Martyrs and Fighters. Ed. by Philip Friedman. Praeger. 320 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by John H....
...The author was one of many Danish citizens who had never known or thought much about Jews, but who found the forced deportation of innocent people such an unbearable specter that they spontaneously banded together to save them...
...Several factors helped make this spectacular rescue possible right under the nose of the Gestapo...
...If Aage Bertelsen has given eloquent testimony of the heroism of which man is capable, Philip Friedman has edited an anthology of human degradation...
...However, it presents more than forty eye-witness accounts from both sides of the Ghetto wall, most of which have never before appeared in English...
...It is true that the Danish fishermen who risked their lives and boats to transport the Jews insisted on a steep price, but there was no betrayal or double-dealing at a time when those talents were at an all-time premium...
...Reviewed by John H. Lichtblau Former CIC officer in Germany...
...All phases of life and death in the Ghetto are touched: the strangulation of economic life, the hunger and disease, the cultural and scientific activity carried on in the midst of all the dying, the almost complete lack of aid—in sad contrast to Denmark—from the surrounding Polish population, the functioning of the Nazi-appointed Judenrat—and, finally, the famous uprising, of which the author says: "It had probably no more military effect on the course of the war against the Germans than did the heroic resistance of the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae in halting the march of the Persian hordes into Greece...
...Their refusal to eat anything but kosher food, the reluctance of some to shave off their beards to avoid recognition, their complete absorption in their rituals even while death threatened all about —all this the author describes with the astonishment of an explorer who has just discovered some strange tribal customs...
...Bertelsen came to like the Jews once he knew them, but somehow they always baffled him, especially the orthodox ones...
...The same public opinion which 25 years ago became aroused on a worldwide scale over the fate of two Italian immigrants in Massachusetts, which was outraged in 1933 when Jewish store windows were smashed on Berlin's Kurfurstendamm, today calmly accepts the fact that most of the murderers of 5 million Jews are alive, free and vociferous...
...Have we become so immunized to horror that its impact does not outlast its newsworthiness, or was the crime committed in Germany so monstrous that the mind refuses to grasp it...
...Dr...
...Friedman's book is an historic document whose importance will continue to grow as time blurs and softens the horror of the events with which it deals...
...One was the fact that there were only about 6,000-7,000 Jews in Denmark...
...The most important reason, however, was that the Danes wanted the Jews to be saved and did something about it...
...Yet, by and large the world has already forgotten...
...contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review" It is less than ten years since the mills of death stopped grinding in Germany...
...Dr...
...Friedman, himself a survivor of the Ghetto and now teaching Jewish history at Columbia, has given us a valuable, detailed work, documenting the lowest depths to which humanity has yet sunk...
...The risks were grave, but night after night little fishing boats left the blacked-out coast of Denmark for the lighted shores of Sweden until Denmark, too, had become Judenrein—in a way not intended by the conquerors...
...His Martyrs and Fighters is by no means the first book to deal with the tragedy of the Warsaw Ghetto...
...another was the proximity of neutral but friendly Sweden...
...Whatever the reason, it is important that books are still being published to refresh our memory and shed new light on the Great Catastrophe...
...The most heart-warming aspect of the story is the ease with which the author could call upon almost anybody in Denmark for help...
...October '43, by Aage Bertelsen, tells how, when the Germans began deporting Danish Jews to extermination camps in October 1943, the citizens of Denmark shipped almost the entire Jewish population off to Sweden, which had promised it a haven...
...As Sholem Asch says in his deeply-felt foreword, we must "record and recount not only the evidences of human degradation but side by side with them set forth the evidences of human exaltation and nobility...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 35
