Afternoon sunlight reflects on the boat’s hull. The red and white flag behind its small wooden cabin flutters in a light breeze. From any vantage, it’s an undistinguished vessel—an ordinary workboat—but its history is anything but ordinary. It is, in fact, remarkable. In 1943, the boat was one of numerous small crafts that participated in Denmark’s exceptional and heroic rescue of its Jewish population during the Holocaust.
The boat, the Gerda III, built in 1926 in Copenhagen as a lighthouse tender, is now on long-term display at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport Museum. Its main function was to deliver supplies and crew to the Drogden Lighthouse, a beacon located offshore in the Øresund sound, the body of water that separates Denmark from Sweden. In October of 1943, however, the Gerda III took on a very different and consequential role.
Three and a half years after Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Den-mark on April 9, 1940, Hitler ordered that the country’s Jewish population be rounded up and deported to con-centration camps in a single night—the night of October 1-2, the end of the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. Danish leaders found out about the plan just 72 hours before it was set to launch, sparking a spontaneous nationwide effort on the part of its citizens to alert, hide, evacuate and ultimately save Denmark’s Jews. Despite being occupied by the Germans, Denmark did not require Jews to register their property and assets or give up their homes and businesses. Nor were they required to wear a yellow star. Furthermore, the country’s king, Christian X, was a firm supporter of the Jewish community.
An overwhelming percentage of Denmark’s 7,500 to 8,000 Jews lived in the country’s largest city, Copenhagen. Within a day or two—warned by a network of political and religious leaders and ordinary citizens—more than 7,500 Jews and their non-Jewish relatives went into hiding. Rabbi Marcus Melchior, the chief rabbi of the city’s Great Synagogue, canceled services, warning that there was no time to continue prayer and entreating everyone to go into hiding immediately. “The worst was not the fear of [going] from a carefree schoolboy into a hunted Jew,” remembered Herbert Pundik in an oral history at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “but seeing my parents so scared and out of control…from one hour to the next, we had become homeless.”
When the Nazis began their roundup on the night of October 1, they were only able to locate a few hundred Jews, most of them in a home for the elderly.
Henny Sinding Sundø (right) worked with the crew of the Gerda III (left, on exhibit at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport Museum) in October 1943 to help save Denmark’s Jews by ferrying them to neutral Sweden. (Photo credit: Gerda © Mystic Seaport Museum / Courtesy of the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, NY )
The sole hope for those Jews secreted in private homes, churches, hospitals and forests lay across the narrow Øresund sound in Sweden. On October 3, unoccupied and neutral Sweden broadcast a radio message offering asylum to Denmark’s Jews if they could make their way to Sweden. The invitation was in large part due to the urgent plea of Nobel Prize-winning Danish nuclear physicist Niels Bohr, who had escaped to Sweden in late September. The Jewish refugees now had a possible path of escape, if only they could get across the water.
Hundreds of boats, including the Gerda III, one of the first to help, sprang into action to assist in the risky rescue. The journey, about 12 miles from Copenhagen to Sweden (less from points north) could take anywhere from half an hour to an entire day, and German patrols were on the lookout for boats carrying Jewish refugees.
Built of oak and powered by a 78-horsepower semi-diesel engine, the 40-foot-long Gerda III could move at a speed of eight knots (9.2 miles per hour). Alone it saved an estimated 300 Jews, transporting them covertly in groups of 10 to 15 across the sound, concealed in the ship’s hold. Twenty-two-year-old Henny Sinding Sundø, the daughter of the commander of the country’s Lighthouse and Buoy Service—Danish Navy Officer Paul Sinding—led Gerda III’s rescue activities along with its four-man crew. Adventurous, daring and athletic, Henny loved to race sailboats and ice boats on the sound. She was also a passionate patriot.
Starting at one in the morning and working from a list of Jews and their locations that she would receive the evening before, Henny would gather up individuals and take them to a warehouse along the waterfront where the Gerda III was docked. She had to commit the lists to memory to avoid carrying any paper evidence with her. Once at the warehouse, the refugees would hide in the attic until Henny could escort them to the boat. In the predawn darkness, skillfully evading the German guards, she would lead them one by one to the dock and Gerda III’s cramped cargo hold.
The modest vessel would then set out on her official lighthouse supply duties, detouring to the coast of Sweden to put her clandestine cargo ashore. Although the vessel was regularly boarded and checked by German soldiers, the refugees were never discovered.
In 1989, the Gerda III was donated by act of the Danish Parliament to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. The vessel, which was restored to her wartime appearance by the J. Ring-Andersen yard in Denmark, is currently in the care of the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, where it is on exhibit, along with explanatory boards, pictures and quotes from some of the actual refugees. “We were told to arrive at this fisherman’s apartment at 8 or 9 o’clock on Friday night, the second day of Rosh Hashanah,” testified Leo Goldberger in a 1984 interview. “You were put down like sardines because they wanted to get as many as possible on the boat,” remembered Agnes Julhof Jensen in a 1996 USC Shoah Foundation oral history. “We heard the Germans come on board the ship…they were walking on top of the boat,” testified Hanna Seckel-Drucker in a 1998 oral history.
The compelling story of the Gerda III and the rescue of Denmark’s Jews is further elucidated in a special exhibition now on view at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. The exhibit, “Courage to Act: Rescue in Denmark,” is the museum’s first exhibition specifically designed for visitors aged 9 and up. Through original illustrations, live-action films and recorded interviews, the exhibit brings the story of the Gerda III and the Danish rescue effort—which the museum calls one of the most effective examples of mass resistance and escape in modern history—to life.
Of the 300-some boats that par-ticipated in the evacuation, the Gerda III is believed to be one of only three that remain afloat. During the remainder of the war, the vessel ferried an additional 600 to 700 people to safety in Sweden, mostly Danish resistance fighters and Allied airmen forced to land on or parachute onto Danish soil.
After helping Jews reach safety, Henny fought against the Nazis with the Danish resistance movement until she too had to flee across the sound. In Sweden, she joined the Danish Brigade, a group of resistance fighters who hoped to help liberate Denmark from the Nazis. After the war, she returned to a triumphant welcome in Denmark.
Ultimately the Nazis would find a total of 472 Jews in Denmark and ship them off to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. Danish officials were somehow able to pressure the Germans to allow care packages to get to the Danish prisoners, and the Danish Red Cross was able to monitor their condition. In the end, all but 53 survived.
Despite the tremendous risk, ordinary citizens united to save nearly 95 percent of Denmark’s entire Jewish population—one of the highest Jewish survival rates for any German-occupied country.
In a video on view at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Henny explained she had “felt furious” that the Nazis would “interfere with our Danish people.” The Jews, she said, “were Danes like we were. We never divided [ourselves] up into Danes or Jews.
The Danish Jews, they were just Danes.” In personal correspondence, she emphasized, “We were not heroes. It was the right thing to do, so we did it. Simple as that.”