This is partly in reaction to Julie Waters' excellent diary how do we deal with our own (in) humanity
When I lived in Israel, I was somewhat surprised to find that there were many Jews there named Christian.
They were named after the King of Denmark in WWII.
There is a story, which appears to be apocryphal, that, when the Nazis announced that all Jews had to wear yellow stars, he put one on himself. Whether he actually did or not, it is clear that the Danes simply did not cooperate with the Nazi policies.
At Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Holocaust in Israel, the end of the exhibit has pillars for each European country, with the number of victims of the Holocaust. The numbers are all depressingly, disturbingly high. Tens of thousands; hundreds of thousands; millions. Then there is Denmark. 50. Not 50,000. 50.
Denmark is a small country; it did not have a lot of power; it was occupied. But the Danes did not cooperate.
Edmund Burke said
All that is necessary for the the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing
and sometimes, all that is necessary for the defeat of evil is for good people to fail to cooperate.
But, at the same time in Israel, I was in Ulpan, which is a school for learning Hebrew. One of the students was a young woman from Denmark. She was not Jewish, but had an Israeli boyfriend. She had never heard of the heroes in her own land. She had barely heard of the Holocaust. She was not an idiot, she had been to school, she was not an ignoramus. How did she not know? Why was her country's history not celebrated?
Heroes should be recognized.