Portrait photograph by Judy Glickman of a Danish man who organized rescue efforts

Ole Secher was born in 1918 in Denmark. His father, Knud Secher, was a professor of internal medicine. The Germans occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940, but allowed the Danish government to control domestic affairs. During the occupation, Ole began attending medical school. He was chair of the Medical Student Council and participated in student politics. He cooperated with the Special Organizational Executive that parachuted into Denmark from Britain, often bringing weapons. In October 1943, the news that the Germans were preparing to deport all the Jews from Denmark to concentration camps was leaked. Ordinary Danish citizens as well as resistance groups organized rescue efforts to hide and transport Jews to Sweden. Ole planned rescue efforts from Bispebjerg Hospital. Hospital staff hid refugees until they could be transported by ambulance to waiting transport boats. The Gestapo arrested Ole during a raid of the hospital in December 1943, and he was imprisoned for 6 weeks. Nearly every Jew in Denmark was taken to safety in Sweden. On May 7, 1945, Germany unconditionally surrendered to allied Forces and withdrew from Denmark. After the war, Ole joined “The 16”, a committee of resistance veterans.

Judy Ellis Glickman is a photographer and the daughter of Dr. Irving Bennett and Louise Ellis. Her father was a noted CAlifornia pictorialist photographer in the 1930s and 1940s. She pursued photography at a young age and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1959 from the University of California at Los Angeles. She studied photography at UCLA from 1978-1985, the Maine Photographic Workshop from 1978-87, and the Portland School of Art from 1984-1985. Her grandparents emigrated to the United States at the turn of the 20th century, and her mother and grandmother in 1914. Though not a child of a Holocaust survivor, it was while visiting concentration camps in Poland in 1988 that she began to wonder how many unknown family members perished. During this trip, the work became more personal, real, and meaningful to her. She returns to Europe every year to visit and photograph Holocaust sites. She was asked by the Thanks to Scandinavia Foundation to create a photographic narrative documenting the Danish rescue effort. She has exhibited extensively and won numerous awards. Both her sons are rabbis. She is on the board of the Portland Museum of Art in Maine and is a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in England.

The photograph was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2010 by Judith Ellis Glickman.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Judith Ellis Glickman

Funding Note: The cataloging of this artifact has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.