(Preceding image) Danish children with British and American flags celebrating the war’s end, May 1945.

In those times there was darkness everywhere. In heaven and on earth, all the gates of compassion seemed to have been closed. The killer killed and the Jews died and the outside world adopted an attitude either of complicity or indifference. Only a few had the courage to care.

—Elie Wiesel

On May 5, 1945, the SOE’s Ralph Hollingworth flew from Great Britain to Denmark, where he met with resistance fighters to celebrate a hard-fought victory and stand together on free Danish soil once more.

Also in those first days of May 1945, a pilot attached to the Royal Norwegian Air Force in Great Britain was flying near southern Ireland when he received a call on the radio.

“ ‘ “Come back to base immediately.” ’ ”

As usual, the pilot had a headstrong response. “ ‘We had only been flying an hour and a quarter, and it was meant to be a six-hour patrol, so I replied, “Everything under control, I’m continuing.”

“ ‘But they came back again, even more emphatically: ‘ “Come back immediately.’ ” That was it, the war was over.’ ”

Tommy Sneum turned his plane around. After the war, the former spy would go on to a varied career, one that often involved his first love: airplanes.

There’s a story that the broom handle Tommy and Kjeld Pedersen carried in their little Hornet Moth so intrepidly over the North Sea remained mounted on the wall of the air force base near their landing for years to come.

It was just a broom with a ragged bit of cloth attached; yet perhaps it serves as well as anything as a reminder of the courage it took to defy seemingly impossible odds and come through that long darkness into light.

(Preceding image) Danish girls on the street holding up newspapers with an announcement of surrender throughout Europe.

Mélanie Oppenhejm and her family were taken to Sweden and kept in quarantine because of the fear of spreading typhoid. She then returned to Denmark, where she continued to work on behalf of refugee children. Many of the children, now with children and grandchildren of their own, gathered to honor her shortly before her death in 1982. Mélanie concluded her short memoir about her survival in Theresienstadt with these words:

“So long as there is even the slightest possibility of the cataclysmic events of history repeating themselves, I feel we have a duty to bring our knowledge of that dark era into the uncompromising light of day. If once one has been trapped in a hell like Theresienstadt, one can never forget it.

“Is it possible that such enormities could ever be perpetuated again?”

On October 16, 2014, just a few months before his death at the age of ninety-five, Niels Skov was asked whether he would have done anything differently. He would do the same things, he affirmed, only he would do them “much better. They would never catch us.”

Asked what advice he would give young people today, this forceful, spirited man didn’t hesitate. He issued a challenge, advice he himself had followed since that night more than seventy years before, when he had set out to defy a powerful force of evil with a match and a homemade screwdriver:

“Swim against the stream. Don’t do what other people do.”

(Preceding image) British and Danish flags decorate the streets of Copenhagen following the end of World War II and the liberation of Denmark.