Denmark

Yesterday I had an email from a man in Denmark who told me that he had been rescued in 1943, taken to Sweden in a fishing boat, like Ellen Rosen in NUMBER THE STARS.  He wanted to know where I found the information about the mixture of rabbit blood and cocaine, because, he said, no one in Denmark, including scientists, knew anything about that.

I gulped, because I wrote the book over 20 years ago. No computer then, and I've moved twice since. So I no longer have the research notes.  I became fearful that perhaps I had simply heard the story and accepted it as true, thereby doing what so many other people have done in repeating the myth that the king of Denmark wore a yellow star in sympathy with the Jews. That never happened, and I cringe whenever I hear the false story repeated.

But I started looking, and--whew. Amazingly, I found an obituary  for Dr. Ernst Trier Morch, one of the people who concocted the mixture that saved Jewish lives. Then I kept looking and found more details:

Fishing boat captains were paid (sometimes with stolen

money, according to Mørch) to smuggle the Jewish

people into neutral Sweden, some 5 to 15 miles by water.

When the Gestapo started to use bloodhounds to detect

Jewish people hidden below false bottoms of the boats,

Mørch and a pharmacist friend developed a rabbitblood-

and-cocaine powder that was sprinkled on the

decks to anesthetize the dogs’ noses. To quiet hidden

children, barbiturate suppositories were distributed to

their parents, and Swedish physicians were made available

on debarkation especially to look after the comatose

and deeply sedated infants 

All the Jewish people who were smuggled into Sweden

survived. 

and also a picture of Dr. Morch, wearing the medals given him by the Danish government after the war:

So there you have it: another hero from that time. Dr. Morch died in 1995, at the age of 87. 

Comments

[Tara]

Oh, that's good to know! Thanks for sharing us this information. :)

It's a shame more people don't know about that fact, especially in Denmark.

[Rachel Kissinger]

This is so amazing to find TODAY. I have just finished reading Number the Stars to my students. We were focusing on historical fiction and they were very interested in the information found in the Afterword. It made it more real for them. They thought it was really cool that I found this entry, posted just yesterday, and to see the actual details about the concotion, to see the picture of Dr. Morch.

The kids clapped when we finished the story and commented that they wished there was a second book so they could read about Ellen's return.

Thank you for writing this book and enlightening us all on this part of history. Thanks to to your friend, Annelise, for sharing her memories with you.

[Betty Birney]

Brilliant, Lois. Your concern about the truth is what makes your writing so superb. Thanks for disseminating this information in a strange landscape of Holocaust deniers (sp? - it must be deniers, can't be denyers), we need to have this information out. And Bravo to Dr. Morch for his creativity! I'm so glad you called him to our attention.

[Tammy Gillmore]

Thanks for this update and your willingness to share...now I will share this with my students...soon we will read The Giver.

[SallyB]

NUMBER THE STARS has always been my favorite childhood book. To this day, I remember the book with Ellen's Star of David necklace imprinted on her friend's hand. At the time, I wanted a good story. Now, as an adult, I'm glad to hear the history behind it. Thank you for this information--so interesting!

[Hugh Flynn]

That is very interesting i read the book more then a year ago and wondered were that mixture came from.My grandfather livied in Yogoslavia from 1932-1946 he was able to speak german during the tim of the invasion so he communicated with the nazis.His fathers farm was on the site of a factory.In the loft of that factory is were the local Partisans livied.His mother cooked for them and his father hid supplies for them.My grandfather got every were by sking then and every year when he was a little boy kis father would build him a small track going down hill the first every year it snowed (he didnt have to build it more then once it is a very snowy country).But he hid supplies under the slope.One day the nazis got reports that they might be hidding them in the lopft.So his faher was ahead of it and sent the partisans hiding somewere in the woods.The nazis went in the loft with my grandfathers father.The man leading the nazis stepped in excrement (the partisans had no toliets in the loft)heexclaimed What is this!! My greatgrandfather cooly said...theres alot of cats up here.The nazis left.The Yogoslavian ressistance was the only ressistance throught out the war to push the nazis out with no allied assistance.