By Donald H. Harrison 

COPENHAGEN, Denmark—Forget that story about the Danish king who wore a yellow Jewish star to protect the Jews from the Nazis.  It wasn't true.  But there is another story about a 20-year-old college student who was a member of the Danish resistance group called Helga Dansk. She wore a red cap to protect the Jews.

The red cap was how the Jews were able to recognize this brave Christian woman who risked her own life countless times to help smuggle them from Nazi-occupied Denmark to nearby neutral Sweden.

The story of the "girl in the red cap" is true, although her exact identity did not become known until 10 years ago when Denmark observed the 40th anniversary of the October 1943 rescue of the Jews.

At that time, "the girl in the red cap" was revealed to have grown up into an esteemed professor of virology and a director of Denmark's famous Carlsberg Brewing Company.

Her name is Ebba Lund.  Madam Travel Agent and I had the honor of meeting and talking with her at her home here in the Danish capital.  Like most Danes, she is very modest about her role in saving the lives of so many people, even embarrassed when emotional thanks well up from the hearts of Jewish visitors like ourselves.

I had heard that Ebba Lund personally had helped to smuggle 1,500 Jews out of Denmark after Nazi plans to round up the Jews and ship them to concentration camps became generally known. But Ms. Lund said that figure was an exaggeration, that the number probably was between 500 and 800 people whom she whisked to safety.

To save one life is to save the universe, I remembered.  This kind woman, sitting across her dining room table from us and coughing from a lingering cold, had saved between 500 and 800 universes.

She said she based her estimate on two factors: "the numbers of people I could put on the boats (about 35 each) and the amount of money I had available."

"There were no listings, no names, of course; it all had to be very discreet, and that is why it came out so well—no one (in her charge) was captured, and this of course is the delight of my life that it worked," she said.

Prior to interviewing Ms. Lund, Nancy and I had toured the exhibit at the Danish Resistance Museum commemorating the 50th anniversary of the rescue of the Jews, and detailing the unique circumstances that led up to this thrilling episode in human decency.  A copy of the 36-panel exhibit is now owned by the Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. 

Ms. Lund reminded us that before the Germans made their decision to round up the Jews, they had occupied Denmark for more than three years. For most of that time, Germans thought of Denmark as a "model protectorate," while the Allies fighting the Germans contemptuously dismissed Denmark as "Hitler's parakeet."  Danish agriculture and factories helped fuel the German war effort.

From April 9, 1940, when the Germans invaded and occupied Denmark, to Aug. 29, 1943, when the Danish government resigned rather than accede to various German demands—including an ultimatum that resistance fighters be executed—Danes were divided in their sentiment about how best to deal with the hated occupiers.

Young, passionate lovers of freedom like Ms. Lund and the Helga Dansk wanted to disrupt the Germans in any way they could—strikes, sabotage, propaganda—but the leaders of Denmark's constitutional monarchy argued that Denmark must instead cooperate with the overwhelmingly more powerful Germany in external affairs in order to keep a high degree of autonomy in its internal affairs.

With such autonomy, the government pointed out, Denmark could avoid the disastrous consequences of an outright German takeover. Among the most obvious examples, the government could point to was that in contrast to all other countries occupied by the Germans, no single piece of anti-Jewish legislation was required to be enacted by the Danish government. 

That's why Jews never had to wear the yellow star—and why King Christian X never wore one either. 

Relations between Germany and its "model protectorate" frayed over time, with Hitler becoming infuriated in September, 1942, with King Christian X after the king accepted his birthday greetings with only a curt telegram of acknowledgment instead of the fawning thank you's that Hitler had come to expect from the "leaders" of other occupied countries.

As Ms. Lund recalled that period 50 years later, "the whole thing started when...we lost our government...and we capsized the navy, and the Germans took the Danish soldiers and put them into a camp, and all this was unexpected. It resulted in a reaction in the population...we had a population that was eager to do whatever they could to get the Germans..."

"In the end of September and beginning of October, 1943, it became my job to become the "export leader' of Helga Dansk—you understand what I mean by that, we had to bring people to Sweden, " Ms. Lund said.

To accomplish the task, "we needed money and we needed transportation," Ms. Lund said. "The money part is in a way very important. WE had a number of friends, including a young fellow who also was an engineering student like I was and like my sister was, and he went to his home—they were big, land-owning people—and to the other people of that nature, and within days they got half a million Danish krone.

"In the meantime, we, by all kinds of means in small amounts and big amounts, got as much money in the city, so we had the extraordinary situation that we had plenty of money for the job," Mrs. Lund added. "And that seems so strange, because, I mean, we didn't have much in our own pockets and then, all of a sudden, we had what we needed for this."

The next problem was securing boats, "and I didn't own any boats and my friends didn't have any," but then she remembered an acquaintance who had worked for a ship's provisioning company "and I went to him and asked if he could get me some connection with some kind of boat, preferably in the harbor of Copenhagen, and he did so within two hours or something like that."

Her initial foray into smuggling human beings had only two people aboard—a woman and her husband whom they nicknamed "the American" because he had been to the United States. The man paid Mrs. Lund's friend for the passage.

"And then I discovered that this fellow, this dear friend of mine, got too much money in his own pocket and that was unacceptable to me and my friends, so we decreased the price very fast," she said. "But at the same time I got on very good terms with quite a number of fishermen in the northern harbor of Copenhagen, and we really trusted each other in a funny way that worked right away.

"I had right away three to five fishermen's boats that were willing to sail for me and did so, and it cost a lot of money, and I said, 'I don't care, I don't care anything about the money so long as they get the people in a good way, that I can trust.'

"They wanted the money because they assumed that if they were taken by the Germans, they would lose their boats, and if they didn't have the boat, they didn't have anything, and I accepted that point of view.

"Some people later on have reproached us that we let so much money go into this, but I told them that the only thing that matters is that it works.

"We did it in daytime, not like certain daring and very nice people up and down the coast of Denmark, where they went at night. I went in daylight because we had the curfew, and I didn't want to take another risk. So we went in daylight, and we did this kind of thing day by day until the big amount of people were out."

The questions literally tumbled from our mouths. How did she stage the people from hiding places to the boats? How many people went per trip? How long did the operation take? Was she ever discovered?

"Quite a few (Jews) were gathered together in my parents' home—that was in the northeastern part of Copenhagen, very close to the harbor...From there, together with my friends, I would essentially take taxis out to the harbor, but I never permitted the taxis to go into the harbor. We would have to walk, or go on bicycle, with the luggage on our backs as we went. Northing else was permitted."

Many other Jews were hidden by other groups under false patient names in Copenhagen's hospitals and later taken by boat to freedom.

But, "I was scared that some of the big and good people from the hospitals went directly to the harbor by taxis and were so obvious," Ms. Lund said.  "I was so scared, that we walked in daylight."

The boats could carry approximately 25 persons seated closely together below deck in the passenger cabins. "We had three or four fishing boats at one time and we quietly went out" in the guise of being an ordinary fishing fleet on which the Germans depended for food supplies, Mrs. Lund said.

"We had the good fortune of still having naval coast guard police who were Danish and they really were paid by the fishermen, so they helped.

"And there was another source of help, something that we didn't really want to talk about at the time, because we hated the Germans so much and couldn't admit the fact that some of them helped us.

"Simply, they told the coastal guard when they were going out (on patrol) and when they weren't, and that was a great help, I tell you... They (some German soldiers) didn't like the whole thing; it was obvious that they didn't like it, and at that time we didn't talk about it, but now we do, and it's true."

(Stories of the "good" Germans who helped to foil their Nazi countrymen are told often in Denmark. We had heard a similar report from Arne Melchior, a Jew who is Denmark's minister of tourism and communications, as well as from officials connected with the exhibit prepared by the Danish Resistance Museum.)

The number of Jews smuggled per day varied according to circumstances, Ms. Lund said. The operation "took most of October really, but it was gradually phased down, and in November, it was very much less. But it continued in many ways through the rest of the war."

There were a few scary moments when she thought she would be discovered, but somehow luck stayed with her.

Why did she become involved?

"It is very, very difficult to answer, really," she replied.  "For us, it was obvious, that was what we could do...and so in different ways, we did what we could, and I happened to think that I had a talent for taking care of the exportation."

Prior to the occupation, she said, she had lived the ordinary life of a Danish school girl. Her parents were upper  middle class people from Copenhagen "with certain associations with different people, including Jewish people, and, well, it was just so very natural—there was nothing else we could do."

Although there are "parts of Denmark where people might ask, 'What is a Jew?' among my father's friends there were certain Orthodox Jews and I also knew quite a few of the young German Jews who were sent here (by Zionist organizations) to be taught agriculture..."

"I would have done it for anybody who was in need of help," she said.  "For me, it was not a Jewish problem, it was a simple humanity problem."

About that red cap, we asked.  Does she still hav it?

"No," she smiled, "but I got a new Israeli one. They gave me one in Jerusalem."

Now, back to that story about King Christian X supposedly wearing a Jewish star. The story was told during the war by the Allies and later popularized by Leon Uris in Exodus.

Esben Kjeldbaeck, director of the Danish Resistance Museum, said historians recently have been attempting to determine how such a story got started and why, though false, it came to be believed around the world.

In 1933, King Christian X participated in the 100th anniversary commemoration of the founding of the main synagogue in Copenhagen. Later, after some Nazi sympathizers tried to set fire to the synagogue, the king "wrote a letter to the rabbi thanking him for a book he had sent him and nothing that he was glad no damage had been done to the synagogue," Kjeldbaeck said.

"If you have a king, he is a national symbol of the entire country and it is natural to assume that he has some role in whatever occurs," he said. "There are historical examples of non-Jews wearing Jewish stars, but that was in Holland, not in Denmark.

"There is a folklore antecedent, still told in various European countries, about kings in disguise who help...saving people by disguising themselves as them," Kjeldbaeck said.

Examples might be a powerful king who disguises himself as a poor woodchopper or as a mysterious knight in order to do battle anonymously.

Melchior, the minister of tourism, considered the question of the king and the Star of David in a book titled, There is Something Wonderful in the State of Denmark—the title being a word play on a famous line from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

The story of the Jewish star, he wrote, "is good, but it is not true...But next to mathematical truth is poetical truth...On this basis, the story of King Christian X and the Star of David can be considered authentic. In a dramatized, poetic form, it gives a picture of the attitude of the king and the Danish people toward the numerically small part of the population which is Jewish."

Some statistics: In 1943, Denmark had a population of about four million people. About 8,000 of these were Jews, many there as recent refugees from Germany and Russia. Thanks to people like Ebba Lund, the overwhelming majority of these reached safety in Sweden.

Although some Jewish Danes were killed attempting to flee, and 481 were deported to the Nazi concentration camp of Theresienstadt, at the end of the war, Danish Jewish fatalities stood only at 116.  Those who had not escaped to Sweden by and large survived Theresienstadt, thanks in large measure to continuing concern voiced about their welfare by the Danish foreign ministry and the Red Cross.