Kate goes some places: Danish Resistance Museum

This past Wednesday I visited the Danish World War II Resistance Museum with a class. It was small so there's not too much to say, but it was an interesting museum. I'd been wanting to go here for a while, because what I guess is a pretty silly reason. I read the book Number the Stars when I was in fourth grade. Number the Stars is about a Danish girl during World War II who helps smuggle her Jewish friend out of the country to Sweden. This was the first time I ever remembering knowing anything about Denmark, so I figured I should go to the museum in honor of that book.
Despite it's small size, there were a number of interesting things in the museum (Some of them pictured below). I saw an armored car that was used by the resistance, some wrenches that were used to de-rail trains, a bunch of weaponry, a huge mine, and a whole bunch of uniforms among other things. The museum was pretty interesting because Denmark is pretty much one of the only nations in Europe that managed to save almost all of their Jews during World War II, generally by smuggling them to Sweden and it was definitely cool to see how they did that. Some artifacts in particular stood out from the museum. One was a letter written to home from a political prisoner (first photo below). The families of the prisoners had to do their laundry, so prisoners would send letters sewed into their clothes and these full-length letters could easily have fit in the palm of my hand. I just thought this was really impressive. The other artifact was a little grosser and I couldn't make myself take a picture of it but it's interesting nonetheless. It was an old piece of human skin with a Nazi Swastika tattoo on it. Very gross, and I'm really baffled that they were able to put that in a museum at all. I feel like that wouldn't work in the States, so there's an interesting difference. My teacher told us the story behind it. Apparently, the museum doesn't know how they got it. They were just looking through all of their stuff in the basement and found it. There was some debate over whether to display it, to simply keep it in their archives of stuff, or to give it a burial, since it is human remains. Ultimately, the obviously decided to display it.

On a final note, this museum inspired me to try to re-read Number the Stars. I managed to find a text of most of the book on Google. It was really cool, because the chapter opens up describing the girls running on østerbrogade, which is the street that I live just off of. And continues to describe all sorts of places that used to be nothing more than foreign names, but which I am now well familiar with. That was very cool.