Michael Ignatieff on Why Denmark Protected Its Jews

In the New Republic, Michael Ignatieff enthusiastically reviews a new book, Countrymen, that recounts with "intensely human" detail how

when, in October 1943, the Gestapo came to round up the 7,500 Jews of Copenhagen, the Danish police did not help them to smash down the doors. The churches read letters of protest to their congregations. Neighbors helped families to flee to villages on the Baltic coast, where local people gave them shelter in churches, basements, and holiday houses and local fishermen loaded up their boats and landed them safely in neutral Sweden.

Looks like a compelling read.  After listing several of the contingent factors that led Danes to be one of the few populations to protect its Jewish countrymen, and that led Nazis to allow it to happen there, Ignatieff concludes:

There is a sobering message in Lidegaard’s tale for the human rights era that came after these abominations. If a people come to rely for their protection on human rights alone, on the mutual recognition of common humanity, they are already in serious danger. The Danish story seems to tell us that it is not the universal human chain that binds peoples together in extremity, but more local and granular ties: the particular consciousness of time, place, and heritage that led a Danish villager to stand up to the Gestapo and say no, it will not happen here, not in our village.