2 Honored for Saving Victims of Holocaust

Two octogenarians, one a former Danish police officer and the other an aide to the Roosevelt administration, were honored as heroes of the Holocaust Sunday by the Simon Wiesenthal Center for their actions to save Nazi victims during World War II.

At a Museum of Tolerance ceremony attended by hundreds, Knud Dyby, 82, of Randers, Denmark, and Ruth Gruber, 85, of New York City, were given Holocaust Remembrance Day awards by Gov. Pete Wilson and center founder Rabbi Marvin Hier.

In 1943, as a coordinator of fishing boats, Dyby helped shepherd thousands of Jews, Danish resisters, downed Allied aviators and German deserters to safety in Sweden.

Dyby said Sunday: “It was my fortune to be at the right place at the right time. I do not consider myself a hero. There were many who were not as fortunate as I. They lost their lives.”

Dyby recalled that on Sept. 19, 1944, tired of official Danish resistance, Nazi troops surrounded every police station in Denmark, seized 1,900 of his colleagues and shipped them to German concentration camps. Many did not return alive.

He also noted that Sunday was the 52nd anniversary of the surrender of Nazi troops in Denmark, following a five-year occupation. The next day, he recalled, British troops arrived in Copenhagen to a joyous reception.

Joining Dyby in receiving a standing ovation at the Yom Hashoah ceremony was Gruber, who was sent to Italy in 1944 by then-U.S. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes on a secret mission to escort 1,000 Jewish refugees ordered admitted to America by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Gruber, later an author and a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune whose book on the refugee ship “Exodus” provided the material for Leon Uris’ bestseller of the same name, expressed herself in occasionally tart fashion Sunday.

“We brought in 1,000 Jewish refugees in 1944,” she said. “We could have taken in 100,000, a half a million. While I was in Europe, Adolf Eichmann was shipping 550,000 Jews to the death camps.”

But Gruber also recounted her mother’s visit to Washington to dissuade her Brooklyn-born daughter from accepting the dangerous wartime assignment.

Ickes told her mother, “who was completely unawed by power,” that he would make Gruber a general if necessary to be sure she would be completely safe, Gruber recalled.

It was on the boat home with the 1,000 refugees that she finally felt she was a real Jew, Gruber said. “I learned then about Jewish courage and Jewish terror,” she recalled.

And, she observed, “Those refugees later gave back to America everything America gave to them.”

Wilson, who described Denmark as a “righteous nation,” said Dyby had risked his life on a daily basis and said that Gruber “turned a human face on the sufferings of the world.”

“Unfortunately, too few [in the world] showed courage and humanity” under the fist of Nazi tyranny, Wilson said, and he particularly deplored those who now seek to minimize or deny the Holocaust.

These so-called revisionists “are the spiritual heirs of those who murdered millions,” he said.

“We are the last generation to have lived during the Holocaust,” said the governor. “Twenty to 30 years from now, there will be no living witness. But the dignity, the courage of the people we honor today will never be forgotten.”

Hier also welcomed what he said was a German finance ministry decision last week to open an inquiry into what happened to the bank accounts of 334 German wartime leaders.

The rabbi said that while there has been a great deal of attention to dormant Swiss bank accounts of Holocaust victims, much of what was stolen from them probably ended up in the Germans’ bank accounts.

There may yet be $12 to $15 billion that should be returned to the Holocaust victims or their heirs, he said.