Remember How Danes Donned Yellow Stars To Protect the Jews? That Never Happened.

But a new play explores the equally amazing—and real—tale of how an SS chief foiled Hitler’s plan to exterminate the country’s Jews

By Alexander Bodin Saphir for Tablet Magazine

You know the legend: At the height of the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Berlin ordered all Danish Jews to don the infamous yellow star on the outside of their clothes. But the morning the decree was set to take effect, Denmark’s King Christian X rode out into the city wearing a yellow star of his own. By evening, the message had spread and the entire population of Copenhagen was wearing yellow stars, thwarting the Nazi program by making it impossible to tell Jew from gentile.

It’s an incredible story—probably the best-known example of mass civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance to come out of WWII. The trouble is it’s just that—a story. It never happened, and couldn’t have, because the Danish Jews were never forced to wear the yellow star. But the tale was prominently featured in American news outlets during the war, and after making its way into Leon Uris’ novel Exodus became one of the great unchallenged myths of European resistance.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Nazis failed to deport Danish Jews in significant numbers, thanks to an operation that became known as the “Miracle Rescue,” by which the vast majority of Danish Jews were spirited away to Sweden—a neutral country—in October 1943, where they lived out the rest of the war in relative safety. I first became aware of the story of the “Miracle Rescue” from my grandfather, Raphael “Folle” Bodin, who was a young, talented, up-and-coming Jewish tailor in Copenhagen when the Nazis invaded Denmark. In late 1943, a high-ranking Nazi broke party rules prohibiting fraternization with Jews and came to buy a new suit at the tailor shop owned by my grandfather’s father-in-law on Istedgade, in the red light district of Copenhagen, where my grandfather worked along with his brother-in-law, Nathan Golman.

I imagine my grandfather taking measurements and calling them out to Nathan, who noted them down on a small index card to be filed away. I imagine him trying to stop his hands from shaking and sweating as he stuck pins into the trouser hems of a man who symbolized everything evil in occupied Europe. And I imagine his astonishment when the Nazi, upon returning to collect his new garment, turned to the two Jewish men and warned them that a roundup of the Jews was imminent, telling them to flee.

 Continue reading.