“GOOD MORNING TO you all,” Britta says, and there is a smile on her face. She is feeling better today. Her wardrobe reflects her mood; her light cotton dress has a cheerful floral pattern.
“You’re looking chipper today, Britta,” Catherine says, picking up her writing pad. “Are we still in 1942?”
Britta nods. “Fall of 1942. It was the morning, I was getting ready for school and Grethe knocked on my bedroom door. Without waiting for an answer, she walked into my room and shut the door. She looked woozy again. Her complexion was green, and I could tell she had lost weight. ‘Britta, I need your help,’ she said. ‘Lukas is supposed to meet me at the quadrangle at noon. He’s not answering his phone, so I can’t tell him I won’t be there. I just don’t feel up to it. I don’t think I can make it there without throwing up. Can you take him a message?’
“‘Grethe, you need to see a doctor. You’re sick again and you’ve been sick a lot. Don’t tell me it’s just a queasy stomach.’
“She shook her head. ‘Britta, please, I just need you to take a message. What is a doctor going to do for me?’
“I started to say something like prescribe medicine or give you an examination, when she blurted, ‘Look, I’m not sick. I’m pregnant, Britta.’
“How clueless was I? Sick every morning and I’m not putting two and two together. ‘Does Lukas know? Does Mama know?’
“‘Lukas knows. No one else. Now you know.’
“‘What are you going to do?’
“The corners of her mouth turned up. ‘I’m going to have a baby, Britta. That’s the way these things work.’
“‘I know that, Grethe. Are you going to get married? Does Papa know? When are you going to tell Mama? Has Lukas proposed?’
“‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘We plan on getting married, just not in the middle of a war. We haven’t thought everything through yet. Lukas is in his final year at the university. He plans on looking for a better job in the spring. On his bookstore salary, we can’t afford a place. If we get married now, we don’t have an apartment and we certainly won’t live in his dormitory room.’”
Emma’s hand is on her forehead. She has a look of astonishment. “So, there is another member of my family that I never knew about? This is my family and all these years, I never knew any of this. Now it comes out in the middle of a lawsuit? Why, Bubbe?”
Catherine calms the air with a wave. “It’s coming out now, Emma. In her time and she’ll tell you when she’s ready. Let her be.”
“But Bubbe practically raised me. For twenty years we lived under the same roof.”
Britta hangs her head. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I always meant to tell you everything, but there is pain in this story. I would always think, I’ll tell her some other time. And all those years, it didn’t just affect you.”
Emma is confused. “Well then, who else?”
“Emma!” Catherine says, sternly. “When she’s ready.” Emma nods and pats her grandmother on the arm. “Okay, Bubbe, your way.”
Britta continues. “Grethe was trapped in a dilemma. Babies keep on growing, and your pregnancy doesn’t stop for you to solve your dilemma. Back then times were different. It wasn’t like today. People didn’t just move in together; they got married first. And it was socially awkward, certainly embarrassing, to have a child out of wedlock.
“‘You need to get married,’ I said to Grethe, and that would have been fine with me; I was crazy about Lukas. He was perfect for her. ‘And you need to tell Mama.’ I was stating the obvious.
“‘We can’t get married yet, we don’t have anywhere to live,’ she said. ‘And I don’t have the nerve to tell Mama.’
“‘She’s going to know pretty quick, if she doesn’t know already. If it helps, I’ll sit with you when you tell her.’ She was grateful for the moral support, and we agreed to talk to Mama after Papa left for work. A few minutes later, my father poked his head in the doorway to say goodbye. The two of us were sitting on the bed. He looked at Grethe and raised his eyebrows with that Joseph Morgenstern look that said I know everything. ‘I’m off to work,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we talk later?’ Oh, I thought, he knows, and there is no doubt.
“He closed the door and we looked at each other. ‘He knows,’ I said. ‘And if he knows…’ Maybe it wouldn’t be so difficult to tell Mama after all, we thought.
“As it turned out, she and my father had deduced the situation days ago and had discussed it between the two of them. My mother had three questions for Grethe: when are you going to get married, where are you going to get married, and where do you intend to live? Three questions for which Grethe had no answers. For someone on the road of no return, she had a lot of thinking to do. Mama’s first two items posed the unspoken question: church or synagogue? Mama was fond of Lukas, and she knew that he was Lutheran. ‘Can you accept that I am not marrying a Jewish man, Mama?’ Grethe said cautiously. ‘I don’t think Lukas plans on converting.’
“‘I can accept whatever you two decide,’ Mama said, lifting an enormous weight off of Grethe’s shoulders. Our mother was a remarkable woman, and Grethe wondered why she had ever harbored fears of her disapproval. Mama surprisingly revealed that she had reached out to the rabbi at the Great Synagogue for his counsel. While he wouldn’t officiate a wedding between a Jew and a Lutheran, he thought the rabbi at the Reform synagogue might. Then Mama went to see him, and he consented, if Grethe and Lukas would come to see him first. Problem solved.”
“Not entirely,” Emma says. “They still don’t have a place to live.”
“In my mother’s mind that was never an issue. They would move into Grethe’s room until they got their own place. My mama was only too happy to raise a grandbaby.
“IT WAS AN early September wedding, held in the courtyard of the Reform synagogue. There was a late-summer breeze, the leaves had started to turn, and Mama had decorated the chuppah with fall flowers. Of the greatest significance, I was the maid of honor. The wedding was well-attended, though most of the people were from our side of the family. Lukas’s family lived on Fyn, quite a ways away.”
“Fyn?” said Catherine. “Is that in Denmark?”
Britta smiled. “The island of Fyn is Denmark’s most beautiful island, directly west of the island of Zealand, where we lived, across a large expanse of the Baltic Sea known as the Great Belt. You get there by driving over the Great Belt Bridge, one of the longest suspension bridges in the world. The Holstrums lived in the city of Odense, which is also the home of Hans Christian Andersen. Fyn is known as the garden island, because it is so green and flowerful. And there are castles everywhere you look. Positively charming. You should visit sometime.”
“I plan on it. So, did the Holstrums come to the wedding over the Great Belt Bridge?” Catherine asks.
Britta nods. “They most certainly did, over fifty of them, including Lukas’s sister, Ellen, who was my age. We became fast friends. The wedding was lovely. Grethe, though four months along and showing a bit with a little bump, looked radiant. Mama had arranged for a wonderful feast and we danced well into the evening. When I think back on that day, my father standing proudly in his tuxedo, Lukas and his groomsmen, how happy everyone was…” Britta stops abruptly. Once more, her jaw begins to quaver. She reaches for a tissue and looks at her granddaughter. “Had we only known. We had been lulled into a false sense of normalcy, Emma. The great Cooperation Agreement was nothing but a farce. A mere placeholder. In less than a year, everything would change. We’d be scattered to the winds like poplar leaves.”
THE GROUP REASSEMBLES after a break and Britta continues. “In the fall of 1942, things began to change. Foretold by the cold winds sweeping down from the North Sea, Denmark’s tolerance for the German occupation chilled. Newspapers, a traditionally free and independent voice in Denmark, started to carry stories critical of the Reich. Published news reports on the state of the war, especially the gains of the Allies in northern Africa, Rommel’s defeat at El Alamein, and Germany’s massive failure at Stalingrad were deemed unacceptable to the German administrators. Father told us that German authorities were demanding the right to manage the content of the news. They insisted on the right of censorship, something that we did not previously have in Denmark.
“Father was required to work late more frequently. There were government meetings well into the night. Relationships with the German ministers were testy. Polite camaraderie, which existed at one time between townsfolk and the German foot soldiers, soured. Soldiers complained to their ministers and ultimately to German plenipotentiary Cécil von Renthe-Fink that they were being selectively denied service from Danish businesses, that they felt unwelcome in shops and restaurants.
“Lukas was away from home more often, and while he wouldn’t tell us exactly where he had been, we knew he was on Holger Club business, which meant destruction of German installations and missions of sabotage. Grethe continued to man the radio for coded messages, but she stopped going into the field. From time to time, we’d receive word that resistance groups were having success and disrupting the German forces. German authorities pressured the Danish police to find and arrest the saboteurs.
“The fabric of peaceful coexistence was fraying at the edges. Plenipotentiary von Renthe-Fink sent a warning to the Folketing that Berlin was feeling less secure of Denmark’s cooperation. According to my father, the entire concept of a cooperation agreement, where one party is strongly dominant and the other is weak and subordinate, was being tested. It was not long before Berlin decided to make a change. The final straw was something that came to be known as the Telegram Crisis.”