Author presents new book: “Denmark’s Forgotten Holocaust: My Family History in Letters”

by Harry Sanders

(AJNews) – “My mother survived the Holocaust. Her mother and sister did not. These facts have cast a shadow over my entire life whether I was aware of it or not.”

So writes Bodil Jelhof Jensen in her new book, Denmark’s Forgotten Holocaust: My Family History in Letters, which was published earlier this year.

The author, a retired lawyer who lives in Laval, Quebec, was born in Sweden in 1948 to Danish refugee parents. Her family emigrated to Canada in 1954 and settled in Edmonton, where Jensen studied history and then law at the University of Alberta. As a history student, Jensen was a contemporary of David Leonard, the future provincial archivist who died in Edmonton just weeks ago (on July 3).

Jensen’s first book, Alberta’s County of Mountain View…A History, was adapted from her 1972 M.A. thesis, and it was published in 1983. Mountain View County lies between Red Deer and Calgary; it surrounds the village of Cremona and the towns of Carstairs, Didsbury, Olds, and Sundre.

Around the time of the Centennial of Confederation in 1967, County Reeve William A. Bagnall approached the university about commissioning a history of Mountain View County. Jensen was an undergraduate honours student, and her advisor, Dr. Lewis G. Thomas, recommended her. Jensen wrote her honours essay on the history of the town of Olds, and she continued the project as a graduate student. She spent two or three summers living in the county and collecting oral history testimonies, which she analyzed through her own solid research in libraries and archives. Jensen also collected photographs for the project that have been preserved in the Glenbow collections, which are now housed at the University of Calgary Libraries.

When Jensen was in her second year of university, she learned that her mother’s family was Jewish and that her maternal grandparents, Max and Rose Hartwig, had been sent to Theresienstadt, a notorious transit-stop and death camp located in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, in 1943. Six of the Hartwigs’ seven children, along with their own families, fled to safety in neutral Sweden. (One married daughter had already been living in Sweden.) Family members sent care packages, letters, and money to the Hartwigs. Max had many of these letters with him when he returned from the camp in April 1945. Rose had perished after three months in Theresienstadt.

Jensen learned the history of her grandparents and her mother’s extended family through the letters sent to and from Theresienstadt and through other surviving pre- and postwar documents, letters, and photographs. Jensen learned that, while most Danish Jews had fled to Sweden (some were killed in the attempt), 500 had been sent to Theresienstadt. Of those, 50 died in the camp.

“It was just overwhelming,” Jensen recalls. “And it’s taken me a long time to reconcile all of this.” She elaborates in Denmark’s Forgotten Holocaust: “In my search for my past, I asked two central questions: Who were these people and what happened to them in World War II? I especially wanted to know one thing: What happened that I grew up in a world apart from my family? What happened that contact with my family was reduced to letters?”

Jensen grew up without knowledge of her Jewish roots. She identified as a Dane, and her father was Lutheran. “I probably got more than I realized,” she reflects now. “My mother grew up in an Orthodox home, and you can’t just leave all that behind.”

Jensen went on to practice law in Alberta, the Northwest Territories, and Quebec, where she has lived with her husband, Bernard Fontaine, since 1991. She translated (from Danish) two books written by her mother, Agnes Jelhof Jensen, including the novel Dilemma (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1995), which won a Canadian Jewish Book Prize for Fiction. In Dilemma, a non-Jewish waitress in occupied Denmark protects and ultimately saves a young Jewish girl.

Most recently, Jensen edited and published Denmark’s Forgotten Holocaust. It comprises a contextual introduction that frames the prewar, wartime, and postwar documents, letters, and photographs through which she learned about her own family and, by extension, the fate of Denmark’s Jews. “The beauty of this book is it’s told in their words,” she says. The letters range in date from 1920 to 1959.

“Contrary to popular myth, not all Jewish Danes were rescued from the Nazis and not everyone was well treated,” Jensen writes. “My grandparents fall into that group.” Undoing that myth motivated Jensen and informed the title of her book.

For Jensen, self-publication was a deliberate choice. “This is how I wanted to honour my grandparents,” she says. Self-publication gave her complete editorial control.

Earlier this year, Jensen received a call from Gerda Vester, the archivist at Mountain View Museum & Archives in Olds, to ask if her 1970 honours essay about Olds had ever been published (it had not been). Jensen told Vester about her new book, and the archivist encouraged her to come to the museum to speak about it. Jensen returns frequently to Edmonton, where her daughter lives, so the idea was realistic. “It just fell into place with other commitments that I had,” Jensen says. Her affection for the people she met and the friends she made while researching her thesis also motivated her. “I would walk the mile for the County of Mountain View,” she says.

The audience of some 50 people nearly filled the museum gallery at Jensen’s talk on June 19. Listeners were engaged, and many asked questions. One local man in attendance related the story of a German emigré whom his father had hired as a farmhand after the Second World War. The farmhand had been 14 years old when the war ended, and he rode his bicycle into a recently-liberated concentration camp. There, he saw the corpses that impressed on him the reality and the magnitude of the Holocaust. Telling this story did the same for the Alberta farmer who hired him and the farmer’s son who came to Jensen’s talk.

Jensen donated a copy of Denmark’s Forgotten Holocaust to the museum, where it is available to the public. It can be purchased by writing to Jensen at bodil@sympatico.ca. She will speak about the book at Montreal’s Jewish Public Library on November 18, 7 to 9 p.m., and the presentation will be live-streamed.

Harry Sanders is an historical consultant and freelance writer in Calgary.