After a powerful historical introduction, the book follows the story on a day-by-day basis. The refugees kept diaries, letters, family accounts which have now been brought together and form the basis of this riveting account. The bare facts of this exodus have been known for decades but, astonishingly, no full history of it has ever been researched or written. Over the next 14 days, assisted, helped, hidden, and protected by ordinary people who came together spontaneously to the aid of their countrymen who were suddenly refugees, an incredible 6,500 out of the 7,000 total escaped - smuggled on big boats, little boats, fishing boats, anything that floated - to Sweden. While the government used its limited but formidable powers to manoeuver and to impede matters in Berlin, the warning went out to the Jewish community that crisis was at hand. The King, his ministers, and parliament were all in agreement-those 7,000 people were theirs, they were Danes who happened to be Jewish, and nobody was going to assist in their round-up and certain death. (there were 7,000 of them) for deportation to the camps, they said no. Knowing that German command was coming in 1943 to round up their Jews Denmark, under German Occupation, but with its King and government intact, did something no other country in Western Europe even tried to do. In the entire ghastly history of the Holocaust, only two 'good' stories stand out, and this is one of them.

Countrymen by Bo Lidegaard