The extra­or­di­nary expe­ri­ences of ordi­nary people―their suf­fer­ing and their unimag­in­able bravery―are the sub­ject of Judy Glick­man Lauder’s remark­able pho­tographs. Beyond the Shad­ows responds to the mass mur­der of Jews dur­ing the Holo­caust, while telling the uplift­ing sto­ry of how the cit­i­zens and lead­er­ship of Den­mark, under occu­pa­tion and at tremen­dous risk, defied the Third Reich to trans­port the country’s Jews to safe­ty in Swe­den. Over the past thir­ty years Glick­man Laud­er has cap­tured the inten­si­ty of the death camps in Ger­many, Poland, and Czecho­slo­va­kia in dark and expres­sive pho­tographs, telling of a world turned upside down. In con­trast, the redemp­tive and uplift­ing sto­ry of the ​“Dan­ish excep­tion” is told through por­traits of Dan­ish Jew­ish sur­vivors and Dan­ish res­cuers. Over the course of a few intense weeks in 1943, the vast major­i­ty of Denmark’s Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion, sev­en thou­sand peo­ple, along with near­ly sev­en hun­dred non-Jew­ish spous­es, were hid­den in boats and car­ried across the Øre­sund to safe­ty in Swe­den. Den­mark is the only nation in West­ern Europe that can claim the res­cue of its Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion from the Holocaust.

With texts by Holo­caust schol­ars Michael Beren­baum and Judith S. Gold­stein, rec­ol­lec­tions by Dan­ish Jew­ish sur­vivors, and a pre­vi­ous­ly unpub­lished text by Elie Wiesel, writ­ten in response to this body of work, Beyond the Shad­ows demon­strates pas­sion­ate­ly what hate can lead to, and what can be done to stand in its path.