The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

110 Hans Bios 1944–1945

Thanks to a fat pig in a Romanian forest, Hans Henrik had become a prisoner of war of the Russian army. The shame was so great that the days that followed never entered his memory; week-long roads, bridges and forest tracks flickered through his mind like a film fed through a projector, while his eyes were glued to the floor of a vehicle, staring at his dirty shoes and seeing Mum’s expression in them.

He ended up in some nameless prison camp in a nameless place. Fifteen men slept in the same bed, snuggled up to each other against their own will, like different species of animals, and were woken at four every morning to chop wood until the first days of frost, and after that, sawing. His co-prisoners were all Germans and died at the rate of two a day, collapsing exhausted in the snow and freezing to stone in minutes. But there was a constant flow of ‘new’ arrivals. My father thought they were all the same men, he saw no difference between those who died on one day and those who came the next. Was he perhaps one of them? He couldn’t exclude the possibility that he had died several times and then found life again, as if the camp were a playing field in which life and death challenged each other for the sheer fun of it.

The slaves looked forward to working in the hope of knocking some semblance of heat into their bodies. The food was unbaked dough the size of a fingernail, soaked in freezing water. My father lost a quarter of his stomach and two of his toe tips. But it was still better than being shot in a shitty Romanian village with six thousand lines by Heine in one’s head.

I know all this from the letters he wrote me, in his many attempts to make peace with himself and the world and, by writing, to establish a closeness with his only daughter, writings that would have made good material for a biography but that were too implausible to find anyone willing to publish them in the Icelandic republic of silence, where people wanted to read only total or partial lies.

‘I didn’t utter a word for the whole time,’ he wrote to me. ‘German was frozen inside me. It was as if Hitler were wreaking his revenge on me by taking away my powers of speech. Some of them even doubted I was one of them. But many prisoners lived in hope and sometimes pricked up their ears at the western wind in the hope of hearing shots from the German army. Instead they got Russian lead in their bodies. It is particularly beautiful to see blood colour the snow. The red colour devours the white until it loses its heat. Then it turns black.’

His muteness proved useful in the end. At the beginning of the year they combed through the camp in search of reinforcements because the final offensive was approaching. In the Russian books the Icelander had been registered as ‘Hans Bios,’ and someone was now convinced that this forty-year-old Old Norse specialist wasn’t German at all but Estonian. An inner voice encouraged Dad to accept that honour. Three days later he was a free man and sat fully clothed with a Russian rifle over his shoulder in a vehicle of the Red Army along with a bunch of weary recruits. It was not far from the course that he had lumbered on at the German steering wheel three winters earlier, half a war younger, and about twice as optimistic. Yet the fact that he was now wearing another jacket, the enemy’s, was not quite as humiliating as he had imagined. Anything was better than felling forests for Stalin, and when it came to the crunch, the uniform in itself was of no importance, we’re all brothers in war, we’re all enemies in war: surviving it was the only thing that mattered. Dad was now fighting solely for himself. He had to reclaim the small territory he had sacrificed to conquer a world that was now lost.

‘And when you go from Russia to Poland, at least you’re heading for Iceland.’