Portrait photograph by Judy Glickman of Danish fisherman who ferried Jews to safety

Frede Svendsen was a Danish fisherman from Gilleleje, Denmark. The Germans occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940, but permitted the Danish government to retain control of domestic affairs. In October 1943, information that the Germans were prepared to begin the deportation of all the Jews in Denmark to concentration camps was leaked. Ordinary Danish citizens and resistance groups organized rescue efforts to hide and transport Jews to Sweden. Gilleleje was a large fishing harbor on the northernmost part of Zealand, Denmark (Zeeland, Netherlands) with train connections to Copenhagen. The local fishermen helped 1500 Danish Jews escape to Sweden. Frede, due to a false alarm that the Gestapo was coming, rescued 180 Jews who had gathered at the port in response to a rumor that a boat was leaving at 10pm. As the boat departed, a man came running and, at the last minute, was pulled aboard; he returned after the war to thank his rescuers. The war ended on May 2, 1945, when Berlin fell to the Soviet army. Germany surrendered to the Allied Forces and withdrew from Denmark.

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.