Dr. Koster's wife Doris (played by Mia Farrow) strikes a very real and human note in the film. She wants to help their Jewish friends and neighbours, but she's terrified for her own family. What will happen to their children if they are found harbouring Jews in their home? This is easily understandable to anyone who has children in their lives that they cherish and protect; it's one thing to decide to risk your own life for a noble cause, and quite another to risk those your children. It would give anyone pause, to have to decide to put one's own family at risk in order to save someone else's. And yet the Kosters- and many others- did just that.
Also, kudos to Disney for not sweeping it under the rug that the Kosters were Christians; it's not emphasised by any means but neither is it overlooked entirely, something I'm pretty sure wouldn't occur today. There's even a bit of scripture quoted, from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 26:35-36
"For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me."
"What made the courageous effort of the staff at Bispebjerg Hospital even more remarkable was the fact that it was not the exception, but the norm. From King Christian X – whose brusque answer to the Nazi demand that Denmark do something about its “Jewish Problem” was that Denmark had no Jewish problem because its Jews were equal Danes: “Viking Jews” he called them – to the humble street cleaner, all took part.
Tens of thousands of Danes, businessmen, professors, clergy, taxi drivers, fishwives, farmers, train conductors, even policemen, took up the challenge to sabotage the Nazi effort to destroy the Jewish community of Denmark. The authorities refused to co-operate, and the bishops circulated a pastoral letter to be read to all congregations denouncing the Nazi attempt as un-Christian, and urging their parishioners to help their Jewish fellow citizens."
- Little Dunkirk: A Very Different Holocaust Story
Dr. Nathan Bamberger, whose father was the rabbi of the famous old Leader-straede Synagogue during the rescue, recalls with wonder that “when we returned to our home, which we had had to leave so suddenly on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 1943, all the settings at our dining table were still exactly as we had left them.”
- Little Dunkirk: A Very Different Holocaust Story