Jews and the Swedish Connection of WWII

He has told you, O mortal, what is good,
    and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice and to love kindness
    and to walk humbly with your God?

                Micah 8:6 NRSVue 

This week we came across  a film called The Swedish Connection on Netflix and almost gave it a pass because the reviews suggested it was okay but not brilliant. Yet the subject matter of this drama intrigued us, the efforts by lower-level bureacratic officials in officially neutral Sweden during the Second World War to save Jews from their own country living elsewhere. Later they extended the effort to bring Jews to Sweden from other Scandanavian countries.

When I checked, the principal characters were actual people who were engaged in this merciful and sometimes perilous work. One of them, Gosta Engzall, faced resistance from his political superiors because of the risk of antagonizing the Nazis, yet in the telling of the story he went from being timid to bold in his efforts and was instrumental in protecting 100,000 Jews. Happily, he lived to be one hundred. The film was inspiring and we pondered the courage of everyday people, including Christians, to live out practical compassion for those who they didn't know and were of a different religion. 

In October 1943, the Danish underground initiated an operation to transfer Jews to the Swedish coast in boats, thereby saving most of Denmark’s Jews. Gilbert Lassen ferried the Jews in his boat to a ship waiting about 200 meters from the shore, which took them to Sweden.

It sparked a memory of seeing a small fishing boat at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. It had belonged to one of the hundreds of fisherman who embarked on a night-time evacuation of 8,000 Jews and non-Jewish spouses in Denmark to Sweden when news leaked of a plan by the Nazis to round them up. 

In the film there were fleeting glimpses of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who issued passports to hundreds of Hungarian Jews so they could escape the Nazi occupied country. Also, Dag Hammarskjold, who was involved in saving Jews and went on to become the second Secretary General of the United Nations. 

While Wallenberg and Hammarskjold have received considerable recognition, Engzall and his determined team have only more recently been acknowledged.

Before his death in a plane crash in the 1950s Hammerskjold was championing displaced Palestinians. He was committed to justice, wherever that led him.

All these points of connection were "cause for pause" for two ordinary viewers who as Christians want to be "brave", or at least engaged in the issues of our time, following a moral compass inspired by Christ's compassiom.  

                                                                         Dag Hammarskjold