Karen Lykke Poulsen, a Danish rescuer, was an active participant in the underground Communist movement during World War II. The Germans invaded Denmark on April 9, 1940, but permitted the Danish government to control domestic affairs. Communism was made illegal after the occupation and the Communist party went underground. Members began organizing small acts of sabotage against the Germans; these actions increased in scope as the war continued. In October 1943, non-Jewish citizens learned from German officials that plans were in place to deport all the Jews from Denmark to concentration camps. Ordinary Danish citizens as well as resistance groups organized rescue efforts to hide and transport Jews to Sweden. Karen helped organize rescue and transport efforts. On May 7, 1945, Germany unconditionally surrendered to Allied Forces and withdrew from Denmark. 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.
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Black and white photographic print taken by Judy Glickman of Karen Lykke Poulsen, a rescuer active in the Communist underground in Denmark. Karen arranged for hundreds of Jews to be safely sent from Zealand to Sweden. Germany occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940, but allowed the Danish government to retain control of domestic affairs. Jews were not molested and the German presence was limited. After the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and began to face military setbacks, a Danish resistance movement developed. On August 29, 1943, the Germans declared martial law and began to address the Jewish problem. A mass deportation was scheduled for October 1. The plan was leaked and Danish citizens organized a large scale rescue effort to hide the Jews and, by the eve of the deportation, had ferried 7000 people, nearly all the Jews in Denmark, to neutral Sweden.
Restrictions on use. Donor retains copyright for this collection.
The photograph was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2010 by Judith Ellis Glickman.
Black and white gelatin silver photographic print, portrait orientation, medium shot, lit from the left, depicting an older woman with short gray hair and wispy bangs sitting in a chair smoking. Her body is turned to the left and she looks up to the right; her lips are pressed into a smile and there are deep lines around her nose and mouth. Her dress has pagoda sleeves and frog closures at the neck. In the left background sheer curtains are closed over a partial window above a radiator and opaque curtains are open to the right. The print is attached to a top hinged mat board with photo corners on the backboard. Pencil stop lines and English text are on the reverse of the window mat. window mat, reverse, bottom, pencil : vertical
overall: Height: 20.000 inches (50.8 cm) | Width: 15.750 inches (40.005 cm) pictorial area: Height: 13.380 inches (33.985 cm) | Width: 8.500 inches (21.59 cm)
Portrait photograph by Judy Glickman of female Danish rescuer