The name is a compound of two old Danish words. Gil means a crevice or cleft; leje means a place where fishermen come in season. It was probably shortened from Gilbjerg Leje, after the headland just west of town — a rather dramatic name for a rather modest point. Villages ending in -leje across Denmark tend to date from the sixteenth century, when the seasonal camps hardened into year-round settlements, and Gilleleje fits the pattern. An excavation in 1979 turned up a house buried under the sand, built shortly after 1536 to judge by a coin found with it. By then the community was solvent enough to build a church and pay a priest, which took real money; the church was inaugurated in 1538 by the newly ordained Hans Lauridtzen. The town has since settled on 1488 as its official founding year, mostly because round anniversaries are easier to celebrate.

In 1588 the vassal of Kronborg drew up a list of what each Gilleleje fisherman owed the crown — a barrel of cod, or half a barrel. About seventy names appear on it, most of them Lauritsen, Rasmussen, Jensen and Skomager, which is as close as we get to a census of the early town. It did not last. Too many fishermen chased the same fish, families could not both eat and pay, and by 1632 only eighteen households remained. The dunes made it worse: drifting sand buried boats and nets, had to be shovelled clear before any real work could start, and swallowed part of the eastern side of the town outright. Recovery came in the 1810s and 1820s. A proper harbour was built in 1873 on the old drying ground, the outer harbour followed in 1902, and the railway arrived in 1896. Gilleleje harbour is today the fifth-largest commercial fishing port in Denmark.

Germany had occupied Denmark since April 1940. On the night of 1 October 1943 the Gestapo moved to arrest the country's Jews — and found most of them gone. Warned in advance, Danes across the sound-facing towns had begun hiding neighbours, colleagues and strangers in attics, hospitals, summer houses and church lofts, then moving them to the coast. Gilleleje, closer to Sweden than almost anywhere else on Zealand, became a funnel. Fishing families took people aboard cutters built for cod and ran them across the Kattegat, sometimes for a fee, often not, always at the risk of the boat and the crew. Nationwide the effort worked to a degree that still seems improbable: some 7,200 Jews and around 680 non-Jewish relatives reached Sweden within weeks. It was not organised from above. It was thousands of small decisions taken by people who had a boat, a loft, or a car, and who decided that this was not going to happen in their town.

In Gilleleje the boats could not always go. German patrols worked the streets, and people waiting to sail had to be put somewhere. Around eighty of them were hidden in the loft of the church — the same church consecrated in 1538 — for several days, listening to the town go about its business below. On the night of 6 October the Gestapo came straight to the loft. The hiding place had been betrayed by a Danish girl who had told her German boyfriend. Nearly everyone was taken; one boy got clear and hid in the churchyard. It was the largest single seizure the Gestapo managed in Denmark, and it happened in a town that had spent the week doing the opposite. The local priest, by every account, never got over it. What followed was not the fate that met Jews seized elsewhere in occupied Europe: of roughly 470 deported from Denmark to Theresienstadt, all but 51 survived, kept alive partly by relentless Danish pressure — food parcels, official visits, a refusal to let them be moved further east. Fifty-one people still died there.

Set into the floor at the entrance to the church is a memorial tile by Gerda Thune Andersen, carrying the priestly blessing from the Book of Numbers in Hebrew: יברכך ה' וישמרך — "The Lord bless you and keep you." You walk over it going in. Elsewhere in town, other memorials remember the fishermen killed when their boats struck sea mines, a hazard that outlasted the occupation by years. At Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, an authentic Gilleleje fishing boat stands for the whole rescue. The town itself, population about 6,600, still runs on fish and on summer visitors drawn by the light on this exposed northern coast. Both things are true of Gilleleje at once: it was a door held open, and it was where the door shut on eighty people.