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Martha Loeffler first heard of concentration camps in 1941, when her mother, a Yiddish-speaking immigrant, related a frightening description she had just read in the Forward.

Loeffler brushed it off, saying, "Oh, Mama, if it isn't in the American [mainstream] newspapers, it can't be true."

By the time one of Loeffler's sons married the daughter of Holocaust survivors three decades later, preserving firsthand accounts of the "years of harsh treatment and deprivation" had become her passion.

Intrigued by stories of a powerful Danish underground that rescued most of Denmark's Jews from extermination, she interviewed Knud Dyby. He alone arranged for 700 voyages from Denmark to Sweden.

Loeffler is speaking around the Bay Area with Dyby, whom she profiled for her new book, "Boats in the Night." The two will speak on Sunday morning at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center.

Loeffler, 79, was born in Oakland and was a longtime Berkeley resident. She now lives in Modesto, where she is a Modesto Bee columnist and freelance writer.

Loeffler first met Dyby, now 85, at his home in Novato.

"It was extremely difficult to interview him, because, like most Danes, Knud is extremely modest," Loeffler said in a phone interview. "He would mention something, and I would ask him to tell me more about it, and he would say, 'Oh, don't talk about that. We all did things.'"

About 8,000 Jews were living in Denmark at the time of the 1940 German occupation. Between October 1943 and May 1945, nearly 1,800 Danes were smuggled to Sweden, including 726 children. Dyby, a Danish policeman, helped arrange the sea voyages, once disguising himself as a skipper.

In her book, Loeffler introduces Dyby to her readers on Sept. 19, 1944 — when the Gestapo arrived in Copenhagen to arrest the entire Danish police force. An off-duty police officer, Dyby pedaled by on his bicycle when a bullet whistles through his hat. He reverses course as his colleagues are forced onto a flatbed truck at gunpoint.

By his own admission, Dyby makes for an unwitting saint. He cheated his way through school, although he became a skilled boatsman (and shameless womanizer). In "a bad year for good looks, they chose me to serve in the Royal Guard Regiment," a high honor.

After his military service, he became a police officer. Called to serve along the German border, he quickly leaped into his first resistance act: Although police reported flights of English warplanes bound for Germany, he and his colleagues began scrambling the information when they learned the Germans were intercepting their reports.

Dyby used his position to obtain guns and hand grenades, which he passed on to the resistance underground. He also taught young volunteers how to use firearms.

By the end of the war, he was moving daily, staying in one of Denmark's many safe houses. He changed his name frequently.

Dyby first became involved in the sea rescues in 1943, when Danish resistance discovered that the Germans had planned a round-up of the country's Jews on Rosh Hashanah. By the time the German cargo ships dropped anchor, the vast majority of Jewish Danes had been hidden and were later transported to Sweden.

Because many of the Danes were involved in a silent conspiracy against the occupation, Dyby didn't have a problem taking time off work to aid with the transport of Jews to Sweden. When he used the excuse that his grandmother died for the second time, his boss replied, "Don't you think your grandmother would appreciate it if you used a police car?"

In the course of his work with the resistance, Dyby would wait with the escapees, hiding in darkness in harbor towns to watch for the lights of the arriving rescue boats.

"The refugees sometimes scrambled 100 yards through ice-cold water three or four feet deep, gratefully grasping outstretched hands as they were hauled into the boats," Loeffler writes. Dyby never asked the names of the people he aided in case he was caught and interrogated by the Gestapo.

And when the Gestapo began using dogs to sniff out the presence of passengers beneath the floorboards of sailing vessels, Dyby had a pharmaceutical lab mix a concoction of human blood plasma and cocaine.

"The blood attracted the dogs and when they sniffed the powder they couldn't smell anything at all," he told Loeffler. "After that, the powder was sprinkled on the gangplanks of all the boats and we didn't have any more trouble with the dogs finding our passengers."

Many of his resistance comrades were killed, some during interrogations, some in the camps. But Dyby does not consider himself a hero.

In the book, Dyby offers, by way of explanation, "Ordinary people [are] sometimes able to do extraordinary things."

Loeffler's book is the outgrowth of a letter she received in 1997 from the Holocaust Oral History Project, now based in San Mateo, seeking writers to tell some of the stories that had been videotaped. Project organizers put her in touch with Dyby.

In the book, she thanks the Oral History Project as well as her family, who assured her that penning her first book "at my age" was a perfectly plausible idea.

"They did encourage me to hurry," she writes.

The slim volume is barely a morning's read, and may be more suitable for young readers. Loeffler's earnest text runs to cliché: Arrests occur amidst the "usual busy commotion" of the nation's capital, Jews are hidden "anywhere and everywhere," and reports of an impending raid "spread like wildfire."

Sadly, the powerful story is undermined by the prim prose, but it is nonetheless compelling.

Loeffler will spend April on a lecture-tour of the Midwest. In May, after a trip to Israel, she will meet Dyby in Denmark. They will be joined by the U.S. Ambassador to Denmark as well as a staff member of Rep. Tom Lantos' (D-San Mateo) office.

"I want to sit in that synagogue where the announcement of the round-up was made," she said. "Can you imagine what that must have been like?"

She hopes the book will find a home in high school and community college libraries, where students of the Holocaust can read it "as a supplement" to more formal literature.

When she speaks to groups, people are inevitably amazed to learn about the Danish resistance, and the extent to which average Danes participated in it at some level.

"They are really a remarkable people," she said.

Loeffler closes the book at Dyby's request with a quote from his fellow resistance worker, the late Otto Springer: "The hand of compassion was sometimes faster than the calculus of reason."