The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

41 Farewell, Copenhagen 1941

After Christmas, everything changed. Jón Krabbe, the courteous crab, appeared with the New Year’s sun in his white hair to announce that the embassy apartment where Mum and I were living had been sold. Within a week, some new eminent German was expected to be moving in with his wife. ‘He’ll be working in the Ministry of Education, where he’ll be responsible for the teaching of Danish children. They intend to implement reforms,’ Krabbe explained, without, as usual, suggesting any judgement in his words. I left a note in the refrigerator for the new tenants: ‘Children who speak German get beaten up in Danish schools.’

Wasn’t that just collaboration?

Mum and I moved in with Dad’s sister, Kylla, who lived in Zeeland with her Faeroese husband. There were also some of his fellow countrymen there, amiable and squinty-eyed people whom we welcomed in the dearth of Icelanders during those war years. Since the Faeroese make up an even smaller nation than ours, we get along famously. We don’t have to strive to be their equals the way we do with other Nordic countries.

I enjoyed our time at Aunty Kylla’s and had fun moving the mountains of Zeeland by throwing stones at them – cattle are the only formations that rise above the flatness of their fields there. Once, we went down to the shore and saw the ‘Danish sea,’ one of the most pitiful sights I’ve ever set eyes on. Mum soon grew anxious, however. She felt uneasy in other people’s homes. Solutions were explored. It wasn’t easy for her to find a job, perhaps because of the language, and having heard all the stories about the Danish school system, she wasn’t too keen to enrol me somewhere where I might be bullied again.

Finally Dad came to our rescue. After several phone calls, he had managed, through some acquaintances, to find some housework for Mum with a doctor’s family in Lübeck. The only snag was that there was no room for another child, since there were already six living there. After even more phone calls, the following short-term solution was found: a colleague of Dad’s from the Nordic Studies Department in Lübeck, Dr Helmut Baum, who now worked at the War Accountants’ Office in Berlin, kept his wife and children at a safe distance from the horrors of war on the island of Amrum in the North Sea. I was welcome to stay with them until the spring.