ABSTRACT
This is the nub of this present volume, which is trying to transcend the established limits. Its collected contributions open up towards the deeper anthropological dimensions of migration and movement. At the horizon, one can see a theory of the people – as migrating people. An important political implication of migration, if understood in this way, is civil security. Pride and Shame, Tradition and Modernity: Some Cases of Migration Migration is not just one phenomenon. When talking about migration, one talks about a large diversity of migratory phenomena. Let us enter by some cases. The Danish Jews During World War II, the Danish Jewry succeeded in emigrating to Sweden and was thus rescued from the German Nazi holocaust. The fate of the Danish Jews is regarded as unique among the occupied countries of that time. When German authorities prepared an Anti-Jewish raid in 1943, a danger-signal coming from a German official was via a network of Social Democrats forwarded to the Mosaic community in Copenhagen. The Jewish people left their homes and found shelter among ‘Aryan’ Danish people so that the German Nazi round-up some days later became a fiasco. The majority of the Danish Jews could subsequently escape to Sweden by small boats, helped by friends and fishermen, the latter sometimes
The rescue of the Danish Jews had its background in the well-integrated life of the Jews in Danish society. This made Nazi Anti-Semitism especially unpopular in the country. Furthermore, the action of rescue became a matter of Danish national activism against the German occupants. In fact, the resistance movement in Denmark had been rather weak during the years before. The action of pro-Jewish solidarity, mobilizing a broad spectrum of initiatives, now made the Danish resistance movement an important factor in peoples’ conscience and brought forth its organizational break-through.
