Portrait photograph by Judy Glickman of Danish woman who rescued several 100 people

Ebba Lund was born in 1923 in Copenhagen, Denmark, to upper middle class Christian parents and had a sister, Ulla. The Germans occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940, but allowed the Danish government to control domestic affairs. Many Danes were opposed to the occupation and formed resistance groups. Ebba and Ulla worked for an underground newspaper, Frit Denmark [Free Denmark]. In August 1943, Ebba read a public poster announcing the German declaration of martial law in response to increasing acts of sabotage and resistance. In protest, she joined Holger Danske, one of the largest resistance groups, established in 1942. In October 1943, non-Jewish citizens learned from German officials that plans were set to deport all the Jews in Denmark to concentration camps. Ordinary Danish citizens as well as resistance groups organized rescue efforts to hide and transport Jews to Sweden. Twenty year old Ebba organized rescue efforts, raised money, and secured boats from friends and supporters. Jews were hidden in private homes and in hospitals under false patient names until they could be taken to the harbor where Ebba escorted them to waiting fishing boats. There were 3 to 4 boats, each holding 25 passengers below deck. The boats left as if it was a fishing trip. The Danish coast guard and some German soldiers worked together, timing crossings to Sweden for when the waters were not being patrolled. Copenhagen was under curfew and, to avoid additional risks, the operation took place in broad daylight. Ebba wore a red hat as a signal to Jews that she was their contact and was known as “The Girl in the Red Cap”. She helped save 500 to 800 people. Nearly every Jew in Denmark was taken to safety in Sweden. On May 7, 1945, Germany unconditionally surrendered to Allied Forces and withdrew from Denmark. After the war, Ebba studied chemical engineering, earned a doctorate in immunology, and became the head of the Department of Virology and Immunology at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen. She died, age 76, in 1999.

Judy Ellis Glickman is a photographer and the daughter of Dr. Irving Bennett and Louise Ellis. Her father was a noted CAlifornia pictorialist photographer in the 1930s and 1940s. She pursued photography at a young age and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1959 from the University of California at Los Angeles. She studied photography at UCLA from 1978-1985, the Maine Photographic Workshop from 1978-87, and the Portland School of Art from 1984-1985. Her grandparents emigrated to the United States at the turn of the 20th century, and her mother and grandmother in 1914. Though not a child of a Holocaust survivor, it was while visiting concentration camps in Poland in 1988 that she began to wonder how many unknown family members perished. During this trip, the work became more personal, real, and meaningful to her. She returns to Europe every year to visit and photograph Holocaust sites. She was asked by the Thanks to Scandinavia Foundation to create a photographic narrative documenting the Danish rescue effort. She has exhibited extensively and won numerous awards. Both her sons are rabbis. She is on the board of the Portland Museum of Art in Maine and is a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in England.

The photograph was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2010 by Judith Ellis Glickman.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Judith Ellis Glickman

Funding Note: The cataloging of this artifact has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.