It is also about the Danish experience-and the moral ambiguities-of Nazi occupation. 'Countrymen' is not just a book about the fate of Denmark's Jews, however. In his new book ' Countrymen', Bo Lidegaard, editor-in-chief of the Danish newspaper Politiken, recounts the 'untold story of how Denmark's Jews escaped the Nazis'. It's a book to be recommended to anyone who has a deeply cynical view of human nature, but also to anyone who wants to see how people can behave brilliantly and how political and moral norms can hold against extremism, bullying, violence and threats.In 1943, 7,742 Jewish citizens of Denmark-95 per cent of the country's Jews-were spirited away to neutral Sweden with the help of their fellow Danes, under the noses of the occupying German forces. It's a great story, both heartening and human, which tells of how some Germans behaved better than expected, and shows how decency can prevail in the hardest of times. Leon Wieseltier I absolutely loved this book. Bo Lidegaard's moving and meticulous book is itself an expression of the idealism that it documents. The idea of humanism has been under attack for so long now, as false and sentimental and impotent, as insufficiently radical to make a difference, that it is stirring to be given a grand example of the opposite case - of a clear, muscular, brave, and effective humanism, and in the whole of a society. I will not soon forget this epic of decency, this saga of humanism saving lives.

Combines all the immediacy of personal drama with an unerring sense of the wider implications of Denmark's achievement - David Crane * Spectator * Countrymen is extraordinary. Michael Ignatieff * New Statesman * Lucid, compelling and scrupulously fair. An intensely human account of one episode in the persecution of European Jews that ended in survival. Once the drama kicks in, it turns almost into a thriller, with a handful of first-person stories woven into the larger political machinations - Ian Birrell * Mail on Sunday * Magnificent. It is as exciting as any spy thriller - Richard Overy * Sunday Telegraph * It is an inspirational saga, one in which decency and democracy defeat the forces of darkness, and it is superbly told by Bo Lidegaard. Ian Buruma * Guardian * Based on contemporary diaries written by a number of Danish Jews, Lidegaard has written of exactly how the escape of two families was planned and carried out, hour by tense hour. The story Lidegaard tells of how Danes, from the top bureaucrats, Church leaders and police officials down to the humblest fishermen, helped the Jews escape when the Germans tried to deport them to concentration camps in October 1943, is indeed astonishing and heart-warming.

A tremendously stirring book - Dominic Sandbrook * Sunday Times * Magisterial.

The rescue of the Danish Jews is surely one of the most extraordinary - and genuinely moving - stories of the last century.

Countrymen by bo lidegaard