Leeway Cottage (19 page)

I
n London, at Churchill's Special Operations Executive,
there is fierce satisfaction in September of 1943. Finally Denmark is boiling. Now the illusion of neutrality is behind them. This is good. At least, according to the Resistance.

For Laurus things are both better and worse.

For two years he has translated news for the underground presses, communiqués from SOE to the Resistance cells, instructions for handling bombs and weapons. He has helped with strategies, geography, and contacts; he has friends all over the country, musicians he has played with, friends he has made on tour. He knows a great deal about storage in various auditoriums and concert halls; he knows who has access to the stage doors and loading docks, places where caches of arms and explosives can be moved in and out undetected along with a grand piano or a set of drums. He knows also that Nina, his adored little sister, has been working for the student underground for a year.

The awkwardness is this. Laurus knows that if the Germans decide to move against the Danish Jews, the organized Resistance (stronger every week) is under orders to stay out of it. It is essential that the Resistance not draw down vengeance on the Jews, and similarly essential that protecting the Jews not endanger the work of the Resistance, compromising the intelligence and escape routes they need for their own work. If the worst happens, Laurus won't be able to lift a finger to protect his family.

J
ust after Labor Day in 1943, Bernard Christie underwent
hemorrhoid surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. Most of the young doctors had gone to war, and the surgery was done by gentle old Dr. Southworth, who had come out of retirement to fill in. This was probably a mistake. Like many men of his generation he enjoyed his cocktails, and like many doctors he enjoyed his access to the medicine cabinet. More so lately, since there was no reason not to enjoy a soothing buzz in the sunshine as well as by lamplight, when all he was likely to cut was deadheads from the roses. Bernard's surgery was not complex but there are always ways for such things to go wrong and this one did. The patient failed to thrive, complained a great deal, and refused to sit up even on his rubber doughnut, even after the hospital said he could go home. At home, he was eventually found by Maudie unconscious on his bed of pain in a pool of fresh blood. His face was a greenish color and even his gums were white. He was rushed back to the hospital in an ambulance where he had many transfusions and the chief of surgery had to be called in to sew him a new anal orifice.

Candace's difficulties in explaining all this to Sydney on the phone were epic. It was a minefield of forbidden images and vocabulary, and yet she was alone in a big house with her husband in pain and possibly dying, and she didn't know what was going to happen and she wanted her daughter with her, she really did. Brash noisy Sydney, brimming with health and confidence these days, was just what she wanted. Or thought she wanted.

On her end of the phone, in her apartment in New York, Sydney heard something in Candace's voice that was new, and it touched her. Her mother was getting old. Her mother was looking into a future in which frightening and disgusting things could happen that she was helpless to intimidate or banish.

“Would you like us to come out for a day or two?” she astonished herself by asking.

“Well…yes, dear, I really would. If you thought you could do that.”

Sydney packed up her own clothes, and the baby's diapers and equipment, and with a fair mountain of luggage, she took a taxi to Grand Central Station and boarded the overnight train for Cleveland. (
IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY
? asked signs from the station walls.) Travel was terrible these days, with trains crowded with soldiers and constantly sidetracked to make way for other trains on war business. With that on their minds, both Sydney and Candace had forgotten for the moment that her mother didn't really like small children.

What Sydney never forgot was that to walk into her mother's house, to have the smell of it swamping her senses as she stepped into the front hall, lily of the valley perfume, furniture polish, her mother's cigarettes, was to be assaulted with a densely layered reexperience of misery that she feared as others fear physical pain. But here it came. She was her father's daughter, and a soldier's wife, and it was the right thing to do and she was on her way to do it.

O
n September 17, 1943, as Bernard Christie is
nearly bleeding to death in Cleveland, Nils Svenningsen, director of the Danish Foreign Ministry (or who would have been if there were still a legal Danish government), goes to see Werner Best in Dagmarhus. He is kept waiting, but only briefly. The plenipotentiary greets him politely and offers him tea.

“It's real,” Best says proudly, of the tea.

Svenningsen declines. “Your people have broken into the offices of a Danish social organization and stolen files,” he says.

“Really?” Dr. Best is, rather fussily, warming his teapot with boiling water and measuring out his precious oolong.

“The Jewish Community Center. They made a mess and took away lists of the members' names and addresses.”

“I believe I heard about that.”

“They were heard speaking German and seen leaving the premises.”

“Not in uniform, were they?” asks Best. He carries the tea tray to his desk and sits down. To Svenningsen the tea smells of culture, of ancient civility, of parties his piano teacher gave after recitals when Svenningsen was small, with pitchers of thick cream and pastries piled on plates. Best does not repeat his offer to share it.

“Not in uniform, no, but they certainly were German soldiers.”

“Well, they're far from home. They get up to things when they're off duty. I wouldn't say it meant anything.”

Werner Best looks calmly at Svenningsen over the rim of his teacup. Svenningsen stares at him. “This is not the start of an action against Danish Jews?”

“I assure you, it is not. There are no plans for any such action.”

 

Nina knocks on the door of a house near Marmorkirken. She is still tan from summer sun and her hair has streaks that are almost white. A girl she knows from school opens the door and smiles her in. When the street door closes behind them, they hurry through the parlor to the kitchen, and down the cellar stairs.

In the basement, by the light of a bare bulb, a young man types a mimeo stencil on a portable typewriter, a rare object these days. Three young women are collating pages while a boy runs the mimeo machine. There is a Webly pistol lying on a shelf above him; the mimeo boy is also the guard.

Their paper is hardly more than a flyer but it has a wide readership; nobody knows how many because each copy is passed from hand to hand. The paper changes locations every week or so.
Free Denmark,
a monthly with a much bigger circulation, is being composed at present in a dental clinic, where trays of type are concealed by day in the medical cabinets and can be hidden at a moment's notice. Some mornings the dentist and his assistant have to clear cigar ash off the spit basin and check the tray of dental tools for wayward type slugs.

Nina picks up one of the sheets now running from the mimeo machine. She stares at it, then looks up at the boy turning the crank. He looks furious. She takes the page and sits down with it in the corner.

A saboteur has been sentenced to death and executed. Executed! This is the first instance of capital punishment in Denmark since…Nina reads the story again and again.

There is a change in the weather in the underground after this execution. A fiercer resolve, a cold settled hatred.

Hans Hedtoft is the leader of the Social Democratic Party, unemployed since parliament resigned, or rather, employed in meeting with his colleagues to figure out how to lead or serve when your government doesn't exist. On the evening of September 28, 1943, he is at such a meeting at an assembly hall on Roemer Street when a tall handsome German named George Duckwitz comes looking for him. Duckwitz had lived five years in Copenhagen as a young man, importing coffee. He came back to Denmark in 1939 to a job in the German embassy as a shipping expert. He has the confidence of Werner Best. But with his Danish friends he takes the role of the Good German, whose loyalty is to his country, not to the Nazis. Hans Hedtoft knows him fairly well, well enough to have asked him more than once what is the Reich's true intention toward Denmark's Jews.

Duckwitz arrives at the hall, looking spooked, to call Hedtoft out of the meeting. What he has to say is that Hedtoft was right in his fear; transport ships will be in the harbor by morning. The raids will begin after sundown on Friday, when Jews will be trapped at home around their Sabbath tables or later in their beds. Before Hedtoft can say more than “thank you,” Duckwitz is gone.

Hedtoft calls three others out of the meeting and they make a plan. One knows someone on the police force who can provide cars with gas in the tanks. It's illegal, but it is arranged. These four set off in different directions with only a few hours to maneuver before curfew. Hedtoft goes to C. B. Henriques, a banker and scion of an old Danish Jewish family, who is respected by all. Hedtoft tells Henriques what he knows, and how he knows it.

Henriques replies, “That can't be true.”

Hedtoft had expected dismay, fear, and a lot of logistical questions, but not this.

Henriques says, “These rumors have been in the air for weeks. I've already talked to Director Svenningsen. You are trying to panic a fragile and frightened group of people.”

“A man I trust has risked his life to give us warning.”

“A German?”

“Yes…”

“Then perhaps it is he who enjoys frightening innocent people.”

Hedtoft rushes back to the Social Democrats. What now? They have little time left before curfew, but they set off again.

 

September 29 is a Wednesday. When Rabbi Marcus Melchior greets his congregation he finds more than a minyan, because it is the day before Rosh Hashanah. Melchior is in street clothes, and he has not come to begin the service. After initial shock and denial at the news he has brought them, the congregants leave with it, to spread it as far as it can be, as fast as it can be without using telephones or telegraphs, which they must assume will be monitored. Rabbi Melchior is left to wonder where he can safely store the congregation's Torah, the silver candlesticks, the prayer books. And where is he himself to go with a wife and five children?

Within hours the holy objects are secured in the basement of a Lutheran church. The Melchior family is on its way to Orslev, to the home of another pastor who will hide them until…until what?

In fact the trains are packed in the next few days with families heading for the seacoast. Neither the Danish police nor the German soldiers seem to notice a thing. (Later it will be known that General von Hanneken has refused to order his troops to help with Best's roundup. This is not proper work for soldiers, he declares, perhaps especially meaning soldiers whose commander sees the plenipotentiary as his chief rival.)

All day on September 29 Jews warn other Jews, and turn to their Christian friends for help. Some with no Christian friends turn to strangers. The friends and strangers, furious that it has come to this, take up the message, offering hiding places, money, whatever is needed, while passing the word to anyone who should flee, or can help. Every time one Dane turns to another and dares to repeat the warning, he puts himself in danger as well. There
are
anti-Semites in Denmark, and there are Danish Nazis, and there are people with private grudges. There are even a not-insignificant number of German and Austrian children, orphaned by World War I, who were adopted by Danes, and are grown now with complicated allegiances. Nevertheless Danes turn from one to the next, handing on this fragile, potentially deadly sac of information, knowing that it could burst and spatter all over the lives of everyone nearby, children, spouses, unlucky bystanders. They do it by the hundreds, then thousands.

Nina is in class when someone passes her a note late Wednesday morning. She walks straight out in the middle of a lecture, handing the note to Professor Rosenbaum as she passes. She runs to the café where she and her cohort often meet or leave messages for each other. There she finds three of her friends with a map of the city assigning neighborhoods to everyone who comes in. “Go to every Jew you know. Don't trust the phones, go to their homes. When you're done, go to the streets and shops. Spread the word as fast as you can.” Students scatter through the city.

Kaj is at the hospital; he's been in surgery since lunch. He is consulting with his chief surgeon and looking forward to a nice cup of sugar-beet coffee when they are interrupted by one of their drivers. The driver comes in from the ambulance bay in a rush, with his cap in his hand; he tells the doctors what he has learned.

Kaj's surgery patient, who has just been relieved of her gallbladder, is Jewish. Kaj can't warn or hide her; she isn't even out of the anesthesia yet.

The chief surgeon says, “Discharge her. Readmit her as Karen Jensen.” He asks a nurse to get him a list of every patient in the hospital.

“Dr. Rafelsen…” says the ambulance driver, who is still standing there. “Could you come…” He leads him and Kaj out to the emergency waiting room.

There are nine people there. Some are dressed as for the office, some for housework. Several are wearing two coats and have suitcases. One small elderly lady is in her bedroom slippers; when she couldn't be made to understand what was wrong, her daughter and the driver had simply wrapped her up and carried her down the stairs to the ambulance.

All these faces look from Kaj to Dr. Rafelsen and back to Kaj. This is their worst nightmare. These are mostly the newest of Jewish Danes, refugees who have already fled from somewhere else, whose Danish is not perfect, who see no reason Danes should help them when Poles or Ukrainians have been all too ready to join or lead the pogrom. They don't have Christian friends to turn to. They have cyanide pills they will take before they go much farther. Their own fear is as dangerous to them at this point as the Gestapo.

“What the hell is this?” asks the chief surgeon.

“Well, they're Jews,” says the driver.

“But how did they get here? Have you been scooping them off the streets?”

“No, I took a telephone book and began knocking on doors of families with Jewish names.”

After a pause, Rafelsen says, “I guess we better get them admitted.” He shakes the hand of the gentleman nearest him. “How do you do, Mr. Nielsen. I'm sorry you're not feeling well.” The Jews in the group who speak Danish try to explain what is happening to those who don't.

Kaj says, “Doctor, I have to go home for a few hours.” Dr. Rafelsen turns to him. “My parents are not feeling well either.”

“Ah,” says Rafelsen. “Knudsen, can you take him?” As they leave, Dr. Rafelsen and his nurse are leading the band of Jews toward the maternity ward, where there are the most free beds, where they will be checked in as Nielsens and Møllers and Henningsens.

It's a mess. There is no organization, no one knows what to do besides get the Jews out of sight. Jews in Copenhagen with friends in Helsingør are rushing north. Jews in Helsingør with friends in Copenhagen are passing them going the other way. Jews who don't know where to go are paralyzed, praying, or else simply heading for the woods. If the news they've heard is true they have two days in which to disappear. Old ones, sick ones, mothers with young babies. And there are many who still believe it's a big If.