Despite occasional rough spots and repetitions, Lidegaard, a diplomat turned newspaper editor, delivers a skillful braiding of two threads. 'Countrymen' is the story of how Denmark's Jews survived, and one of the more inspiring narratives of the war. (There's also a legend that the King of Denmark wore the yellow Star of David himself to protest the label the Nazis forced on Jews, but Denmark's Jews were never compelled to wear it.)

In Denmark, a nation occupied by Germany from the spring of 1940, less than 1 percent of the nation's Jews were killed by the Nazis. In Yugoslavia and Ukraine, it was closer to 60 percent, and in France it was 26 percent. Ninety percent of the Jewish population in Germany, Austria, Poland and the Baltics was murdered. We all know that 6 million European Jews died in the Nazis' campaign of genocide during World War II, but the degree of slaughter was not consistent across borders. It is 'one of the oldest and most sticky humanistic dilemmas,' wrote George Kennan in 1940, referring to the choice between 'a limited cooperation with evil in order to alleviate ultimately its consequences' and 'an uncompromising, heroic but suicidal fight against it.' Kennan, quoted in Bo Lidegaard's 'Countrymen' (translated from the Danish by Robert Maas) was in Prague, contemplating the Czechs' response to the Munich agreement, but 'his observation,' writes Lidegaard, 'is equally true for Denmark during the German occupation.'

Countrymen by Bo Lidegaard