Apart from the little incidents like the beer delivery or giving the odd cold shoulder, I don’t know that the family really got involved in any resistance work in the first year of occupation. I didn’t really understand the politics of it all. I know that in the summer of 1941, the German leader, Hitler (the one with the funny mustache), whom everyone called the Führer, had gone into Russia with his men to try and take it over. They had also declared war on all communists. Danish police arrested three hundred Danes, including some members of parliament, for being communists. Some of them were Jews but that wasn’t why they were arrested; in the beginning it was definitely to do with communism. I wasn’t sure what that was, but I knew from school that being arrested for what you believe in was against the Danish constitution. Mrs. Nielsen had taught us that no Danish citizen could be arrested for his religious or political beliefs. Our foreign minister, Erik Scavenus, didn’t seem to know this, or he had forgotten, because he went to Berlin in Germany and signed some deal with Hitler to stop the communists. To lots of people this felt like giving in to what the Führer wanted, and some people demonstrated in the streets.
That was when Orlando came home with the black eye.
“It was supposed to be peaceful,” he moaned while Mama put a steak on his swelling eyelid. “Then the police came and started beating up people. Can you imagine? Our own police?”
Mama dabbed my brother’s eye and then looked at the steak. “Bamse, tell Lisa I think this will still do for supper.”
Papa was furious. “I don’t want you getting involved, Orlando. You’re only sixteen. This is not your fight.”
Orlando stood up so quickly that he almost knocked Mama over. “Isn’t it, Papa? Then whose fight is it? Why aren’t you doing something? What’s the matter with you? Why are you just letting this happen? Do you know what the British are calling us? Hitler’s Canary! I’ve heard it on the radio, on the BBC. They say he has us in a cage and we just sit and sing any tune he wants.”
I thought Orlando was going to cry but he stormed out of the house while Papa stood clenching his pipe. Mama began to cry and I went to make her a special coffee. We had never had fighting in the house and none of us knew what to say to each other.
Apart from the protests about the communists and the odd bit of trouble in the streets, I don’t think it took very long for the Danes to get used to having the Germans under their noses all the time. With the fighting going on in Europe, the Germans were busy, and as long as we were quiet, they pretty much left the Danish people alone. They needed us to grow food and make things in factories. They also needed the Danish trains to get things from Norway and Sweden. Even so, it wasn’t long before fuel became scarce. The weather can be very cold in Denmark, and by the autumn of 1942, people were burning furniture or going out into the countryside to dig up peat from the bogs, which they dried and then used for fuel. There were fewer and fewer cars in Copenhagen and soon only those in the “necessary professions”—doctors, ministers, and some journalists—were allowed to buy gasoline. On Saturday nights even people dressed for a party would head out on bicycles. Often they wore wooden clogs with their fancy clothes—there was no leather for shoes, and old socks had to be mended over and over. Mama went through a brief period of being a really good “wife and mother under occupation by enemy forces.” I remember her sitting darning a pair of my socks and looking at them under the lamp saying, “I’m sure these have been darned so often there isn’t a bit of the original sock left. Look, Bamse, we have made you a completely new sock.”
Mama put her hand up the sock and began doing the voice of a glove puppet. Masha and I laughed. None of Mama’s domestic good deeds lasted very long.
Everyone took to unraveling old sweaters and reknitting them. Even Mama picked up some needles, and she and Thomas spent hours trying to make “haute couture” out of an old green polo neck and a brown flecked scarf. By now there was no coffee. Mama was a coffee fiend and could not bear any of the many substitutes Papa brought home. She and Thomas would sit pouring rum or whisky or anything on the ground chicory root or grains to make them taste better. It drove my father mad when he caught them.
“Marie, you really shouldn’t drink in the middle of the day,” he would complain quietly, and Mama would jump like a naughty child.
“Why, Peter, frozen over and in September too.”
This was what Mother always said to explain the unexplainable. It had become something of a family joke. She had once been in a production of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s story Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The play was set in the Southern states of America and at one point an escaping slave was supposed to jump off a cliff into the Mississippi River and swim to freedom. One night the stage manager had forgotten to put out the hidden mattress for him to land on and when he jumped he hit the floor with a great thud heard by the entire audience. Undaunted, the actor reappeared from behind the scenery and said, “Frozen over and in September too.”
It made Mama laugh every time. Papa was less impressed.
“I mean it, Marie.”
“Oh, tell it to the Germans, Peter,” Mama continued, sounding deeply offended. “It is not my fault that they have taken away my only vice. I cannot live without coffee,” she declared dramatically, as if she might die on the spot.
Thomas would shrug and smile at Papa. “Just trying to make it drinkable, lovey.”
Nobody found it easy. Jorgen Johansen, the taxi driver who lived down the road, managed to develop some sort of makeshift engine for his car that ran on cow dung. How many small pieces of the stuff he threw into his contraption depended on where his passenger wanted to go. It had a foul smell and he was forever hanging around Mrs. Jensen’s, waiting for the cow to poo so he could go to work. Anton offered to jump on the poor thing again to get her going, but Mrs. Jensen chased him off with her broom. The cab made a clunking sound and Mama said she could smell Johansen coming a mile off.
Having the Germans living with us didn’t mean we were protected from the war either. There were frequent air raids, with everyone running to the public underground shelters as soon as the siren went off. Even the sound of the fire engines was terrifying, as it might mean a bomb had exploded nearby.
“Papa, why are they doing this? I thought the British were on our side?” wailed Masha as we all hid under the dining-room table, listening to the sirens and noise outside.
“They are,” soothed Papa, “but they have to bomb Danish factories which are working for the Germans. Sssh, it’ll be alright. They’re not after us.”
We knew that the British were on our side. The British radio, the BBC, now broadcast a daily news bulletin in Danish, and it was the only news anyone could rely on. Still, that didn’t mean they couldn’t hit you by accident, but even with the air raids and the bombs, Mama still went to work. Nothing ever kept her from the theater. In the winter season of’42, she was appearing in a lighthearted revue. Every night the front row was taken by the top German brass, but the show went on. Masha turned sixteen and left school. She got a job at the telephone exchange and suddenly seemed very grown up. We didn’t see her much. Everyone knew she had a boyfriend but she wouldn’t say who. Orlando was hardly ever home. In addition to his work for Mr. Hansen, he had joined the Union of Danish Youth after attending a lecture by Hal Koch, the professor of church history at the University of Copenhagen. Mr. Koch had toured the country celebrating Danish nationalism, and Orlando had taken every word to heart. He helped to organize outdoor Alsangs—community singing of Danish songs—but the Germans soon banned them. Orlando tried to grow a mustache and he got quieter and quieter. He wouldn’t let me come on his deliveries for Hansen anymore and he came back late each night. Sometimes he was carrying a parcel or a bunch of papers, but when Papa asked what he was doing, Orlando shook his head and went to his room. I think we all knew he was doing other things, more dangerous things, as well, but no one said anything. Maybe everyone was too scared to ask.
One night the phone rang. Papa hated the telephone. To him it was still a “newfangled invention” and he would shout as if the person on the other end couldn’t possibly hear him through a thin piece of wire. I ran to answer before Papa could get up.
“Skovlund,” I said as I picked up the phone.
It was a man’s voice. A man I didn’t know. “Is Orlando there?”
“No,” I replied. “Can I take a message?”
“Tell him the sewing club has had to be moved. We’ll let him know where.”
“Right, and—”
The phone went dead.
Orlando came in after I had gone to bed. I heard him in his room and padded along the hall in my pajamas. He was putting something under his bed and jumped and banged his head when I spoke.
“Bamse! Don’t sneak in here like that.”
“Sorry. I wasn’t sneaking. I had a message. On the phone.”
I told him about the sewing club, but he wouldn’t tell me what it meant or what was going on.
“You’re not old enough. You’re only twelve. I don’t want you to get involved. It’s too dangerous. Now go back to bed.”
I couldn’t sleep that night. My heart was pounding. How could a sewing club be dangerous? I knew some Danes were already working against the Germans, but I didn’t want it to be my brother. I went to sleep thinking about what might be so dangerous and wondering what he was hiding in his room. Orlando and Papa hardly spoke anymore and I didn’t really understand it, but I did know one thing: fear, real fear, was beginning to live in our house.