mythologies undermined

I was talking with a friend recently about the fantastic story of the Danish Jews during World War II. The story, specifically, of their survival in the face of the Nazi Occupation. The apocryphal story of the Nazi proclamation that all Jews must wear a yellow armband sporting the Star of David followed, the next morning, by King Christian himself parading through Copenhagen wearing a yellow armband sporting the Star of David, followed, soon after, by thousands - no, millions - of Danes, both Jewish and Christian alike, wearing yellow armbands sporting the Star of David.

This was a favorite story of mine from childhood days, going back at least to fourth grade when Amy Beth Crow and I spent entire days playing odd make-believe games of fleeing the Nazis, hiding in secret attics, behind secret doors, escaping (usually on bicycle) into the imaginary night (though of course always home by supper).

I couldn't have told you, until today at least, where I first heard this tale, but it has been a core truth of mine for decades now. I've spread the word as if it were fact, have wrapped it around myself as proof positive that not only individuals but entire societies can be good and honorable and true.

This year, 2008, marks 75 years since Hitler was democratically elected to power in Germany. There is a fascinating editorial in today's Times about the ways in which societies commemorate opposition to terror. Germany has spent much of its recent history struggling to come to terms with itself, with the horror it perpetrated upon the world (see Jane Kramer's Politics of Memory). But what I found fascinating about this editorial is the idea that Germany (though not Germany alone) has chosen to commemorate the wrong people. Or rather, not 'wrong' people, but people who were ultimately destroyed by their opposition rather than people who survived.

The story of the Danish opposition to the Nazi occupation is the perfect example of this. Not many people seem to know about this opposition, and the ensuing survival of the vast majority of the Danish Jews, even amongst my sometimes frighteningly over-educated group of friends. Instead, we commemorate things like the Warsaw ghetto uprising -- unarguably courageous, but in the end, fatal. It is worth noting that the Polish Jewish population was, for all intents and purposes, completely wiped out by World War II, as opposed to the Danish Jews.

So I read this editorial and started wondering about King Christian, and about this beloved story I've carried with me all these years, and wondered where I first learned of it, and what the specifics were. You can imagine my dismay when I learned, at least according to Wikipedia, that this story is in fact not true, that it became legend with the popularity of Leon Uris's Exodus, which must be where I first heard of it, since Exodus was one of my favorite books in fourth grade (I was a weird kid, okay?).

But this is sort of an amazing idea in and of itself. The Danish Jews survived, and it is argued that they survived largely because of incredible efforts by the Danish people as a whole to hide them, to help them flee Denmark to more welcoming countries, to incorporate and adopt them into non-Jewish families. Yet this doesn't make as good a commemorative story, as good an accounting of the bravery of a people, as a valiant king and an adoring people, and so it had to be dramatized, through Exodus and probably other early sources.

In the end, I'm not sure where I'm going with all of this. But I like the idea of holding up as an example a more subtle resistance -- not that the martyrs aren't important, because they are. But if enough people resisted evil, or at least stood up to injustice, on a daily basis, perhaps we wouldn't need as many martyrs anymore, and the world would be a better place.