One day Karen ran down her street, up the stairs, and threw open the apartment door. She flung her arms about Aage, who was trying to read his newspaper.
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”
She pulled him from his seat and began to waltz around the room. Then she left him standing dazed in the center of the floor and began dancing over the furniture and back to him and threw her arms around him again. Meta appeared in the doorway and smiled.
“Your daughter is trying to tell you that she has been accepted by the Royal Ballet.”
“Well now,” Aage said, “that is pretty good.”
That night, after Karen was asleep, Meta could at last pour out her pride to Aage. “They said she is one in a thousand. With five or six years of intensive training she can go right to the top.”
“That is good ... that is good,” Aage said, trying not to show how very proud he was.
But not everything was fairylands and happiness in Copenhagen. Each night the earth was rocked by explosions caused by the underground, explosions that lit the skies, and dancing flames and the sounds of cracking rifles and stuttering machine guns filled the air.
Sabotage!
Reprisal!
The HIPOS began methodically to destroy places and things that were sources of pleasure for the Danes. The German-sponsored Danish terrorists blew up theaters and breweries and entertainment palaces. The Danish underground lashed back at places where the German war machine was being fed. Soon both the days and the nights were racked by the thunder of destruction and flying debris.
The streets were empty during German parades. Danes turned their backs on German ceremony. The streets were mobbed by silent mourners on every Danish national holiday. The daily horseback rides of the old King became a signal for hundreds upon hundreds of Danes to rally and run behind him shouting and cheering.
The situation seethed and seethed—and finally erupted! The morning of August 29, 1943, was ushered in with a blast heard across Zealand. The Danish fleet had scuttled itself in an effort to block the shipping channels!
The enraged Germans moved their forces on the government buildings and royal palace at Amalienborg. The King’s guard fought them off. A furious pitched battle broke out, but it was all over rather quickly. German soldiers replaced the King’s guard at Amalienborg. A score of German field generals, SS and Gestapo officials descended on Denmark to whip the Danes into line. The Danish Parliament was suspended and a dozen angry decrees invoked. The model protectorate was no longer a “model,” if indeed it ever had been.
The Danes answered the Germans by stepping up their acts of sabotage. Arsenals, factories, ammunition dumps, bridges were blown to bits. The Germans were getting jittery. Danish sabotage was beginning to hurt badly.
From German occupation headquarters at the Hotel D’Angleterre came the decree:
ALL JEWS MUST WEAR A YELLOW ARM BAND WITH A STAR OF DAVID.
That night the underground radio transmitted a message to all Danes. “From Amalienborg Palace King Christian has given the following answer to the German command that Jews must wear a Star of David. The King has said that one Dane is exactly the same as the next Dane. He himself will wear the first Star of David and he expects that every loyal Dane will do the same.”
The next day in Copenhagen almost the entire population wore arm bands showing a Star of David.
The following day the Germans rescinded the order.
Although Aage was not active in the underground the partners of his law firm were leading members, and from time to time he received information of their activities. At the end of the summer of 1943 he became terribly worried and decided that he and Meta must reach a decision concerning Karen.
“It is true,” Aage told his wife. “In a matter of months the Germans will round up all the Jews. We just don’t know the exact time the Gestapo will strike.”
Meta Hansen walked to the window and stared blankly down at the lake and the bridge to the old town. It was evening and soon Karen would be coming home from ballet school. Meta’s mind had been filled with many things she had been planning for Karen’s thirteenth birthday party. It was going to be quite a wonderful affair—forty children—at the Tivoli Gardens.
Aage lit his pipe and stared at the picture of Karen on his desk. He sighed.
“I am not giving her up,” Meta said.
“We have no right ...”
“It is different. She is not a Danish Jew. We have records to show she is our child.”
Aage put his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Someone in Aalborg may inform the Germans.”
“They won’t go to that trouble for one child.”
“Don’t you know these people by now?”
Meta turned around. “We will have her baptized and adopt her legally.”
Aage shook his head slowly. His wife slumped into a chair and bit her lip. She clutched the arms of the chair so tightly her hand turned white. “What will happen, Aage?”
“They are organizing to get all the Jewish people up to the Zealand beaches near the straits. We are purchasing as many boats as we can to make runs over to Sweden. The Swedes have sent word that they will accept everyone and provide for them.”
“How many nights I have lain awake and thought of this. I have tried to tell myself that she is in greater danger if she must flee. I tell myself over and over that she is safer here with us.”
“Think of what you are saying, Meta.”
The woman looked at her husband with an expression of anguish and determination he had never seen from her before. “I will never give her up, Aage. I cannot live without her.”
Every Dane who was called upon co-operated in a gigantic effort. The entire Jewish population of Denmark was whisked secretly north to Zealand and smuggled to the safety of Sweden.
Later that month the Germans made a sweep of Denmark to catch the Jews. There were none to be caught.
Although Karen remained unharmed in Copenhagen with the Hansens the responsibility of the decision weighed heavily on Meta. From that second on the German occupation became a prolonged nightmare. A dozen new rumors would send her into a panic. Three or four times she fled from Copenhagen with Karen to relatives on Jutland.
Aage became more and more active in the underground. He was gone three or four nights a week now. These nights were long and horrible for Meta.
The Danish underground, now directed and co-ordinated, turned its energies against German transportation. Every half hour a rail line was bombed. Soon the entire rail network of the country was littered with the wreckage of blasted trains.
The HIPOS took their revenge by blowing up the beloved Tivoli Gardens.
The Danes called a general strike against the Germans. They poured into the streets and set up barricades all over Copenagen flying Danish, American, British, and Russian flags.
The Germans declared Copenhagen in a state of siege!
From German headquarters at the Hotel D’Angleterre, Dr. Werner Best shrieked in fury, “The rabble of Copenhagen shall taste the whip!”
The general strike was beaten down, but the underground kept up its acts of destruction.
SEPTEMBER 19, 1944
The Germans interned the entire Danish police force for failing to control the people and for overt sympathy with their actions against the occupation forces. The underground, in a daring raid, destroyed the Nazi record offices.
The underground manufactured small arms and smuggled fighters into Sweden to join Danish Free Forces. It turned its wrath on the HIPOS, dispensing quick justice to some of its members and to Danish traitors.
The HIPOS and the Gestapo went berserk in an aimless wave of reprisal murders.
Then German refugees began pouring over the border into Denmark. These were people bombed out by the Allies. They swarmed all over the country, taking food and shelter without asking; stealing and preying on the Danes. The Danes turned their backs on these refugees with utter contempt.
In April 1945 there were all sorts of rumors.
MAY 4, 1945
“Mommy! Daddy! The war is over! The war is over!”
T
HE VICTORS ENTERED
D
ENMARK
—the Yanks and the British and the Danish Free Forces. It was a great week—a week of retribution to the HIPOS and the Danish traitors, to Dr. Werner Best and the Gestapo. A week of din and delirious joy, climaxed by the appearance of creaking old King Christian to reopen the Danish Parliament. He spoke in a proud but tired voice which broke with emotion.
For Meta and Aage Hansen the week of the liberation was a time of sorrow. Seven years before they had rescued a child from grave danger and they had raised her into a blossoming young woman. What a lovely girl she was! Karen was grace and beauty and laughter. Her voice was pure and sweet and she danced with magic wings on her feet. Now: the Day of Judgment.
Once in a fit of anguish Meta Hansen had sworn she would never give Karen up. Now Meta Hansen was becoming a victim of her own decency. There were no Germans left to fight now, only her own Christian goodness. And Aage would fall victim, as he had to, to his Danish sense of honor. Liberation brought upon them a fear of the haunted nights and the life of emptiness that lay ahead of them without Karen. The Hansens had aged badly during the last seven years. It was apparent the moment they were allowed to relax from the tension of war. No matter how trying things had been there had always been room for laughter, but now while Denmark laughed there was no laughter for them. The Hansens wanted only to look at Karen, hear her voice, spend the hours in her room in a desperate attempt to gather for themselves a lifetime of memories.
Karen knew it was coming. She loved the Hansens. Aage had always done what was right. She had to wait for him to speak first. For two weeks after the liberation the gloom thickened. At last, one evening after another wordless meal Aage rose from the table and put down his napkin. His kindly face was wrinkled and his voice a listless monotone. “We must try to find your parents, Karen. It is the thing to do.” He walked from the room quickly. Karen looked to the empty doorway and then to Meta across the table.
“I love you,” Karen said, and ran to her room and threw herself on the bed and sobbed, hating herself for bringing this sorrow on them. And now she was hating herself for another reason. She wanted to learn about her past. In a few more days they sought out the International Refugee Organization.
“This is my foster daughter,” Aage said.
The case worker had been on her job only the few weeks since the liberation, but already she was becoming sick at the sight of couples like the Hansens and Karen. Day after day the woman was being forced to become a party to tragedy. In Denmark and Holland, in Sweden and Belgium and France, couples like the Hansens who had hidden and sheltered and raised children were now stepping forward to receive their bitter reward.
“You must be prepared for a long and difficult task. There are millions of displaced people in Europe. We have absolutely no idea how long it is going to take to reunite families.”
They left with her all the known facts, a list of all the known relatives, and the letters. Karen had a large family and her father had been a prominent man. The woman gave them a little hope.
A week passed, and two, and then three. June—July. Months of torture for Aage and Meta. They would stand in the doorway of Karen’s room more and more often. It was frilly and soft and it smelled good. There were her ice skates and her ballet slippers and pictures of classmates and prima ballerinas. There was a picture of her beau, the Petersen boy.
At last they were called to the Refugee Organization.
“We are faced with the fact,” the woman said, “that all our initial inquiries have turned up nothing. This is not to be taken as conclusive. It means a long hard task. Were it my own decision I would absolutely forbid Karen to travel to Germany alone or even with Mr. Hansen. There is utter chaos inside Germany and you won’t find a thing that we can’t do from here.” The woman looked squarely at the three of them. “I must warn you about one thing. We have been receiving more and more reports each day that something pretty hideous has happened. Many Jews have been put to death. It is beginning to look as though the numbers may run into the millions.”
It was another reprieve for the Hansens, but what a ghastly thought! Were they to keep this girl only because over fifty members of her immediate family had been put to death? The Hansens were being pulled in two directions. The solution came from Karen herself.
Despite the love she had given and received from the Hansens, there had always been a strange, invisible barrier between them. Early in the German occupation when she was but eight years old Aage had told her she must never speak about being Jewish because it could endanger her life. Karen followed this order as she did all of Aage’s decisions because she loved him and trusted him. But even though she obeyed it she could not keep from wondering why she was different from other people and exactly what this difference was that endangered her very life. It was a question she could never ask and therefore it was never answered. Furthermore, Karen had been completely isolated from any contact with Jews. She felt herself to be like other people and she looked like other people. Yet the invisible barrier was there.
Her question might well have died, but Aage and Meta kept it alive inadvertently. The Hansens were faithful to the traditions of the Danish Lutheran Church and were very devout. Each Sunday the three of them went to church together, and each night before bedtime Aage read from the Book of Psalms. Karen treasured the little white leather Bible the Hansens gave her on her tenth birthday and she loved the magnificent fairylike stories, especially those in Judges and Samuel and Kings, which were filled with all the wonderment of great loves and wars and passions. Reading the Bible was like reading Hans Christian Andersen himself!
But reading the Bible only led to confusion for Karen. So many times she wanted to talk it all over with Aage. Jesus was born one of these Jews, and his mother and all his disciples were Jews. The first part of the Bible, the most fascinating to Karen’s mind, was all about Jews. Didn’t it say over and over again that the Jews were people chosen by God Himself to carry out His laws?