When the Germans invaded Scandinavia during World War II, brave Scandinavians risked their lives to protect their Jewish neighbors on a scale unmatched by their counterparts in the Eastern European countries. Narrated by Oscar-nominated actress Liv Ullmann, Rescue In Scandinavia compiles archival footage and interviews with those involved to explore their acts of heroism.

“I carried a four year old child on my shoulders for nine hours,” says a Norwegian man who helped Jews cross the border into Sweden with nothing but his skies and homemade stun gun. His is just one of many remarkable stories shared in Rescue In Scandinavia.

When the Nazis invaded the Scandinavian countries in 1940, each nation reacted differently, but there were non-Jewish citizens in every country who believed it was their duty to help their Jewish neighbors. While some of these heroes survived to tell their stories, others were killed in concentration camps alongside the people they wanted to protect.

Ordinary citizens and people in positions of power alike helped Jews. One of the most inspiring stories shared in Rescue In Scandinavia comes from the former Swedish ambassador to Hungary. While stationed in Budapest, he and his partner managed to save the lives of 200,000 Jews by creating fake Swedish passports and hiding Jews in a giant abandoned building. When one of them heard that a train was departing for Auschwitz, the other would rush to the station to give amnesty to anyone with a Swedish passport. The ambassador remembers one particular incident in which only two Jews at the station had their passports with them, so, thinking quickly (and speaking in Hungarian so the Nazis couldn’t entirely understand), he urged all the Jews who weer supposed to board the dreaded train to show receipts or licenses, any paper they had on them which the ambassador could pretend proved their Swedish identities. In the end, he saved the lives of a hundred Jews that day.

Stories like this are inspiring and exciting, but some of the interviewees come off as a little too eager to see the good in people during the war. When it came to rescue missions, one woman remembers, “Everyone wanted to do something!” Despite her perhaps enviable desire to see the best in everyone, the woman comes off as naïve, even defensive While on the whole the Scandinavian people were more sympathetic to their Jewish neighbors than Eastern Europeans were, there were certainly those who ratted Jews out.

Rescue In Scandinavia does not hesitate to share those stories as well. In Denmark, for instance, an interviewee recalls, a Dane told the Nazis that Jews were hiding in the attic of the church. The Jews were all deported to concentration camps, and the pastor who had hid them was so emotionally distraught that he died soon after.

Despite such devastating blows, one Danish Jew urges us to look at the big picture. Of the 7,000 Jews in Denmark, he says, only 474 were caught; the rest were saved by the decency and quick wits of the Danish people.

The most important aspect of Rescue In Scandinavia is the concept of bravery it lays out through these heroic but very real stories. One thing is constant throughout every interview: over and over, the brave men and women who risked their own lives to save the lives of their countrymen claim that what they did wasn’t heroic. They see what they did as what any decent person would do. And they acknowledge that they were scared.

It’s not that brave people have control over their fear. No, as the interviewees in Rescue In Scandinavia describe it, they’re just as terrified as everyone else. They simply saw no alternative but to push through the fear and to do what they knew was right. In the words of one brave man, “Certainly, I am scared to death. But we have to do this. There’s no other way out!”