So far things had gone well, but our friends could not stay behind the wall forever. It was not safe to stay hidden in the apartment. It was time to get moving. They had to get to Sweden and to freedom. The word on the street was that two German freighters, the Donau and the Vaterland, were on their way to Copenhagen to collect the Danish Jews and take them to the concentration camps. By now there were already several million dead in the Nazi gas chambers, although of course we still didn’t know that for sure. All we had was rumor, but none of what we heard was good.
Papa called out the local doctor to see to Mama and Uncle Johann. Dr. Paulsen was an old man who had delivered all of us at home and he knew my father well.
“What is the plan?” asked Papa anxiously as soon as the doctor arrived with his large black medical bag.
The doctor shook his head. “There is no plan, Peter. No one expected this to happen. We are just having to make it up as we go along. Hundreds of families like you have Jewish friends staying with them till we can get them across the water to Sweden. They say there are many people hiding in a warehouse on Asiatisk Place in Christianhaven. Come here, Johann, let me.” The doctor looked at Uncle Johann’s head and tutted. “That’s quite a crack. I expect you saw stars for a bit.”
He took out a needle and thread and began to stitch Johann’s wound together. “I know for a fact that there is a large number of refugees at Bispebjerg Hospital,” he continued. “Now everyone is working as hard as they can to get them transport to freedom, but it won’t be easy.”
“What do you think we should do?” asked Papa. The doctor shrugged. “It is dangerous but I think you should take everyone to the hospital. My wife is a nurse there. She’ll look after them.”
Mama’s legs were very painful. Maybe it was the makeup on the wounds or maybe she had become too thin worrying about Orlando, but her legs had become badly infected. She sat holding Thomas’s hand. “I don’t know what I shall do without you, Thomas,” she sighed.
“Don’t be silly, Marie, I can’t possibly leave you.”
Mama shook her head. “Thomas, my beloved friend, you must go. It isn’t safe. Go to Sweden. All this madness will be over soon and then we can be together again. I need you to stay safe. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you. Please. Go and change. Hurry.”
I don’t think Thomas would have gone if Mama hadn’t pleaded with him. He kissed her forehead and went to change back into his suit. Mama was in agony and the doctor gave her morphine to help with the pain. Soon she drifted away from us.
Papa showed Dr. Paulsen to the door. He patted Papa on the arm.
“I will come for all of you this evening, Peter. Wait till then and don’t go out.”
The apartment was quiet after that as we all waited for night to make the next move. Anton and I played checkers while Papa paced and chewed on his pipe. Mr. and Mrs. Isak made sandwiches for everyone, but Uncle Johann wouldn’t eat. He was more subdued than I had ever seen him. Spending time with the frightened Beilins and the feisty elderly couple had done him no end of good. Both he and Papa kept apologizing to each other.
“I didn’t think it through,” said Johann. “I believed what people said. I was just scared. I don’t have a family like you, Peter. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it.”
“I should never have believed you would betray us,” said Papa.
“It was a good punch though, little brother,” said Johann admiringly, rubbing his tender jaw.
Anton and I had always thought it would be fun to live in the same flat, but this wasn’t how we had imagined it. We talked a bit about him going to Sweden. I was almost jealous.
“It’ll be fun. No Gestapo and they have chocolate and chewing gum in Sweden,” I enthused.
“I’ll send you some,” Anton declared, trying to look pleased about the sweets, but when it came to it, there was too much family trouble for anyone to relax.
Anton’s dad was very unwell. He didn’t want to come out from behind the false wall, and we weren’t sure we could get him away from the apartment. He sat holding his wife’s hand while Thomas looked after Gilda.
That evening a Falck—a kind of ambulance— pulled up outside the flats. It was a large black car with white wheel arches and bumpers and a cross on the front that our doctor friend had special permission to operate twenty-four hours a day. It was decided that the Beilins, Mr. and Mrs. Isak, and Thomas should all be transferred to Bispebjerg Hospital in the doctor’s car. Uncle Johann would go along to help make arrangements for them, and after much pleading I was allowed to go to.
“They’ll need someone to run messages and keep a lookout.”
Papa was so preoccupied with Mama that I don’t think he really knew what was going on. Masha had taken over running the house, and she made us sandwiches for the journey.
Uncle Johann gave instructions: “No one is to bring a suitcase—it would attract suspicion—so you need to wear as many clothes as possible.”
Everyone took this very seriously. Anton wore two pairs of trousers, two sweaters, two coats, three pairs of socks, a hat, a scarf, mittens, and his sturdy boots. He looked like he was going to the Arctic. People thought of the oddest things they wanted to take with them. Mrs. Beilin wanted to bring a bag of socks that needed darning, and she was worried that she hadn’t dusted properly before she left. Papa promised to look after everything, and Masha said she would darn the socks. This seemed unlikely but it was sweet of her to say it anyway.
We waited till nightfall, and I could hear Papa and Uncle having a heated discussion in the kitchen.
“I thought you said you had learned a lesson.” I could hear Papa’s voice rising in anger.
“Well, yes,” replied Uncle Johann defensively, “I have—but he’s not even a proper man. He dressed as a nurse, for God’s sake. He might give us all away. How do you know you can depend on him?”
“I would trust my life to Thomas,” said Papa quietly, and that was the end of the matter.
“Why doesn’t Uncle Johann like Thomas?” I asked my father later while we checked the batteries in my flashlight.
“The world is afraid, Bamse, of anything that is different. It might be Jews or Gypsies or witches or anything that they don’t really understand. You must stand up for everyone’s right to be who they are— otherwise you may find one day that it is you who is singled out, who is seen as different, and then there will be no one to defend you.”
After that I felt a great responsibility for everyone, so just before we left I went into the conservatory and dug up Orlando’s gun again. I gave it a cleaning and stuck it in the waistband of my trousers under my sweater. It was probably foolish. I should have remembered Chekhov’s words that Mama had quoted: that you couldn’t have a gun without it going off at some time. I didn’t really know how to handle the thing, and I was getting more and more frightened and yet I wanted to help. The Falck arrived and one by one our party slipped from the apartment into the back of the car. Thomas carried Gilda with her precious teddy bear, and Uncle Johann sat in the front beside the doctor.
“On the run in our own country,” muttered Mr. Beilin. It was the first thing he had said for days.
“But at least we are saved by our own countrymen,” said Mr. Isak, and patted him on the arm.
At the hospital everything seemed to be running smoothly. Our small group was admitted under the names of Jensen and Hansen. The doctors and nurses seemed oblivious to the brave act they were involved in.
“If we asked everyone why they thought they were sick, we’d never get anything done,” sniffed one nurse, and she wrote down the name of yet another member of the “Hansen” family who needed “immediate treatment.” After that our frightened little group was taken down into the basement, where we walked along a tiled white corridor that smelled of disinfectant and something else that I couldn’t identify.
“Uncle Johann, what is that smell?”
“Formaldehyde,” he muttered. We were heading for the mortuary—the place where the hospital kept those who had passed on. The living hiding among the dead. Others were on wards, in the boiler room, the chapel, anywhere the staff could find a space.
There was quite a crowd in the mortuary—every kind of person you might see on a Copenhagen street, from little girls like Gilda to ancient grandmothers, from strong young men who dressed just like Orlando to long-bearded Jews wearing peasant coats and skullcaps. There were men wearing suits and hats as if they were going to the office and women with new babies. All life was here. I recognized Adolph Meyer, the head of the children’s hospital in Copenhagen. How could that be? A distinguished doctor, who had once saved Masha from pneumonia, hunted like an animal.
People were sitting on the floor, waiting. Waiting for something to happen, good or bad. More kept coming. The University Rifle Club had two hundred volunteers out combing the parks and other areas to see if anyone had been left behind. They found tired and weak people who had eaten almost nothing for days.
A doctor appeared with a clipboard. “Right, well, I’m sorry you have all been so unwell. The general consensus is that you all need to breathe some fresh air, so a boat trip to Sweden is being organized for your health. Now then, passage is going to cost two thousand kroner per person.”
There was much murmuring at this large sum of money. It was enough to keep an average family for two years.
The doctor held up his hand. “Don’t worry. No one will be left behind if they can’t pay, but I would ask anyone who can contribute more to the common fund to do so for the sake of their fellow passengers. Now, as far as we know, there are currently ‘health trips’ leaving to Sweden from twenty-seven points along the coast of Zeeland from Udsholdt in the north to Hennaes in the south and we just need a little time to sort you all out with a passage.”
The doctor began working out groups who would travel together. What had begun as a well-meaning but disorganized attempt to help was quickly becoming ordered. Uncle Johann and I were trying to calm people and help them. It was a mixed crowd. Unable to carry luggage, some people were wearing furs and several sweaters even though outside it was warm and dead calm: they were wearing their lives on their backs. One woman had so many rings on her fingers that she couldn’t bend them. I saw an actor who had often worked with Mama at the theater. He was dressed like Humphrey Bogart. He had clearly decided to treat the whole thing as if he were playing a part in a spy film, and I knew Mama would have approved.
One woman, who must have been at least ninety years old, was very distressed. She grabbed my hand and began crying, “I don’t have my dress for my funeral. I left it behind. What will happen if I die and I don’t have my dress?”
Urban Hansen, who would later become Lord Mayor of Copenhagen, overheard her. “There isn’t time,” he said. “We are saving people, not clothing.”
The doctors sent me out to see if I could find any more people still hiding. I borrowed a bicycle from a nurse and set out toward the docks. The streets were strange, deserted, and yet the heavy tread of German boots could be heard everywhere. It was like cycling through a bad dream. I was terrified but I was still my mother’s son. I knew where the old woman lived and thought maybe I could pick up the funeral dress at the same time. I didn’t see how it would hurt. I had learned from Mama that being properly dressed for every part was important in life.