The Northern Finale

In 1959 the founders of Häagen-Dazs chose their company’s name (totally made up) to honor the Danish resistance movement during WWII, particularly for their attempts to aid Jews in Denmark and get them to safety in Sweden. The Danish Resistance Museum tells the story of the Danes during their five years of Nazi occupation. The curators of this museum are brilliant. First of all, the museum is underground. As you begin, you are given an audio guide which allows you to listen to the stories of five people in Copenhagen who each held a different political point of view. It starts with rumors of a German invasion, then the government’s accommodation of the invaders, then rising resistance, acts of sabotage, counter-resistance, and finally the liberation of Denmark. They have a station where you decipher a coded German message, and one where you act as a Nazi sympathizer and tap into phone calls to gain information on potential saboteurs. In the end, you find out what happened to the five characters you followed in the tour. I spent more than two hours here, and felt like I had just watched an incredible film. This museum blew my mind. Their choice to retell this story without a political bias and to courageously retell it as a people’s history is powerful. It attempts to put you in the shoes of the people under occupation in a world where it looks like Germany will likely win the war and no one is coming to help you. With the luxury of hindsight, it’s easy for us to believe we understand what we would do under those circumstances. This museum makes you feel the chaos, uncertainty, and the struggle to survive. In doing so, it also highlights the bravery required to resist. Only a small section was about Danish fishermen sailing overnight to Sweden to transport Jews to safety, which is an amazing story by itself, however, this museum is about all Danes, regardless of religion or political views. It’s about holding on to a free society in general and how to preserve it. It’s about watching your country being invaded by an aggressor and trusting your government when they tell you to remain calm and not fight back. It would have been easy for Denmark to take only the accolades — the well-deserved Häagen-Dazs tributes — but here they chose to tell the whole story. Most Danes did not resist the Nazis and some of those Danish fishermen only smuggled out refugees for the money. It’s a very complicated period of history, and, though it has a happy ending, people made choices based on their own survival instincts. If there is one consensus in the museum about resistance, it seems to be that we need to monitor our government closely before things go too far — before the opposition is vilified, before the media becomes a propaganda machine, before the police are told to stand down rather than protect citizens, before guns are confiscated, and before political opponents are rounded up and imprisoned on trumped up charges. It’s a wake up call for all citizens of a democracy. Looking back is easy. It’s harder to see it while it’s happening around you.Read more