HENNY'S BOAT

A sailor recounts the unheralded actions of a World War II hero and her ship.

In this “expanded edition” of his 2017 book, Henny and Her Boat, Veisz adds to his pioneering history of Henny Sinding, a 22-year-old Danish woman who worked with the crew of the ship Gerda III to rescue hundreds of Jews in Nazi-occupied Denmark. An expert sailor in his own right, the author has long served as a volunteer at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport Museum, where Gerda III is currently docked. Following the disclosure of Nazi plans to “capture all of the country’s Jews in a single night” in October 1943, Sinding and the crew of Gerda III joined a myriad of fishing boats and small vessels to transport Jews across the Øresund, a strait that separates Denmark from Sweden. As recounted by Veisz in thrilling detail, Sinding would make hundreds of trips alongside Jews “through the darkened late-night streets of wartime Copenhagen,” as they hoped to accompany the ship’s “daily covert crossings.” Gerda III would later ferry hundreds of resistance fighters identified by Nazis as well as British and American airmen who had crash-landed in Denmark during the final years of the war. The author’s decadelong research into the history of Gerda III, reflected in the book’s ample endnotes, is most impressive, particularly due to the scarcity of recorded materials left behind by the clandestine resistance movement. In addition to having a solid understanding of the historical literature on the subject, the author traveled to Denmark, where he located and interviewed the descendants of the ship’s survivors and analyzed archival material about Gerda III and the Danish resistance movement. And while the work’s original research may be of value to historians, its harrowing story has broad appeal. At under 200 pages, the book has an engaging writing style that is complemented by the ample inclusion of maps, photographs, and other visual aids. Its contention that Danes “overwhelmingly” chose resistance over collaboration with the Nazi occupiers may be overdrawn, but the volume effectively details an extensive Jewish rescue effort “unique in occupied Europe.”

An engrossing tale of World War II civilian valor.