Black and white gelatin silver photographic print, portrait orientation, long shot, shot in direct light, depicting a man with thin graying hair worn in a side part, standing in the doorway of a boat holding a cigarette. He looks directly at the camera with a small smile and has a lined forehead and deep lines around his nose and mouth. He is wearing jeans and a dark colored V-neck sweater over a checked collared shirt with rolled sleeves and a wristwatch. On the exterior of the boat are metal handrails, windows, and a life preserver. The print is attached to a top hinged mat board with photo corners on the backboard. Pencil stop lines are on the reverse of the window mat.
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Restrictions on use. Donor retains copyright for this collection.
Karl Egon Petersen was a Danish rescuer from Gilleleje, Denmark. The Germans occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940, but allowed the Danish government to retain control of domestic affairs. In October 1943, information that the Germans were preparing to deport all the Jews in Denmark to concentration camps was leaked. Ordinary Danish citizens and resistance groups organized rescue efforts to hide and transport Jews to Sweden. Gilleleje was a large fishing harbor on the northernmost part of Zealand, Denmark (Zeeland, Netherlands) with train connections to Copenhagen. Someone approached Karl on the street and asked for his name and address. Karl gave them the information and, as a result, 36 Jews were hidden in his small 2 room apartment. Later that night, he helped to row the escapees, 6 at a time, hidden below deck, across the sound to Sweden in his boat. Many of them were the people he had hidden in his apartment. Nearly every Jew in Denmark was taken to safety in Sweden. On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered to the 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.
The photograph was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2010 by Judith Ellis Glickman.
overall: Height: 17.000 inches (43.18 cm) | Width: 13.500 inches (34.29 cm) pictorial area: Height: 9.500 inches (24.13 cm) | Width: 6.250 inches (15.875 cm)
Black and white photographic print taken by Judy Glickman in Gilleje, Denmark, in 1992 of Karl Egon Petersen, a Danish rescuer. Karl hid 36 Jews in his apartment for a day. Later that night he participated in an escape, rowing people 6 at a time to safety, including some of those he had hidden in his home. On the last transport, 2 policemen boarded the boat, found the Jews, but permitted the rescue operation to continue. 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, the night before the action, Danish citizens organized a large scale rescue effort and ferried 7000 people, nearly all the Jews in Denmark, to neutral Sweden.
Portrait photograph by Judy Glickman of man who rowed several groups of Jews to safety