Leeway Cottage

by Beth Gutcheon

  Nina picks up one of the sheets now running from the mimeo machine. She stares at it, then looks up at the boy turning the crank. He looks furious. She takes the page and sits down with it in the corner.

  A saboteur has been sentenced to death and executed. Executed! This is the first instance of capital punishment in Denmark since…Nina reads the story again and again.

  There is a change in the weather in the underground after this execution. A fiercer resolve, a cold settled hatred.

  Hans Hedtoft is the leader of the Social Democratic Party, unemployed since parliament resigned, or rather, employed in meeting with his colleagues to figure out how to lead or serve when your government doesn’t exist. On the evening of September 28, 1943, he is at such a meeting at an assembly hall on Roemer Street when a tall handsome German named George Duckwitz comes looking for him. Duckwitz had lived five years in Copenhagen as a young man, importing coffee. He came back to Denmark in 1939 to a job in the German embassy as a shipping expert. He has the confidence of Werner Best. But with his Danish friends he takes the role of the Good German, whose loyalty is to his country, not to the Nazis. Hans Hedtoft knows him fairly well, well enough to have asked him more than once what is the Reich’s true intention toward Denmark’s Jews.

  Duckwitz arrives at the hall, looking spooked, to call Hedtoft out of the meeting. What he has to say is that Hedtoft was right in his fear; transport ships will be in the harbor by morning. The raids will begin after sundown on Friday, when Jews will be trapped at home around their Sabbath tables or later in their beds. Before Hedtoft can say more than “thank you,” Duckwitz is gone.

  Hedtoft calls three others out of the meeting and they make a plan. One knows someone on the police force who can provide cars with gas in the tanks. It’s illegal, but it is arranged. These four set off in different directions with only a few hours to maneuver before curfew. Hedtoft goes to C. B. Henriques, a banker and scion of an old Danish Jewish family, who is respected by all. Hedtoft tells Henriques what he knows, and how he knows it.

  Henriques replies, “That can’t be true.”

  Hedtoft had expected dismay, fear, and a lot of logistical questions, but not this.

  Henriques says, “These rumors have been in the air for weeks. I’ve already talked to Director Svenningsen. You are trying to panic a fragile and frightened group of people.”

  “A man I trust has risked his life to give us warning.”

  “A German?”

  “Yes…”

  “Then perhaps it is he who enjoys frightening innocent people.”

  Hedtoft rushes back to the Social Democrats. What now? They have little time left before curfew, but they set off again.

  September 29 is a Wednesday. When Rabbi Marcus Melchior greets his congregation he finds more than a minyan, because it is the day before Rosh Hashanah. Melchior is in street clothes, and he has not come to begin the service. After initial shock and denial at the news he has brought them, the congregants leave with it, to spread it as far as it can be, as fast as it can be without using telephones or telegraphs, which they must assume will be monitored. Rabbi Melchior is left to wonder where he can safely store the congregation’s Torah, the silver candlesticks, the prayer books. And where is he himself to go with a wife and five children?

  Within hours the holy objects are secured in the basement of a Lutheran church. The Melchior family is on its way to Orslev, to the home of another pastor who will hide them until…until what?

  In fact the trains are packed in the next few days with families heading for the seacoast. Neither the Danish police nor the German soldiers seem to notice a thing. (Later it will be known that General von Hanneken has refused to order his troops to help with Best’s roundup. This is not proper work for soldiers, he declares, perhaps especially meaning soldiers whose commander sees the plenipotentiary as his chief rival.)

  All day on September 29 Jews warn other Jews, and turn to their Christian friends for help. Some with no Christian friends turn to strangers. The friends and strangers, furious that it has come to this, take up the message, offering hiding places, money, whatever is needed, while passing the word to anyone who should flee, or can help. Every time one Dane turns to another and dares to repeat the warning, he puts himself in danger as well. There are anti-Semites in Denmark, and there are Danish Nazis, and there are people with private grudges. There are even a not-insignificant number of German and Austrian children, orphaned by World War I, who were adopted by Danes, and are grown now with complicated allegiances. Nevertheless Danes turn from one to the next, handing on this fragile, potentially deadly sac of information, knowing that it could burst and spatter all over the lives of everyone nearby, children, spouses, unlucky bystanders. They do it by the hundreds, then thousands.

  Nina is in class when someone passes her a note late Wednesday morning. She walks straight out in the middle of a lecture, handing the note to Professor Rosenbaum as she passes. She runs to the café where she and her cohort often meet or leave messages for each other. There she finds three of her friends with a map of the city assigning neighborhoods to everyone who comes in. “Go to every Jew you know. Don’t trust the phones, go to their homes. When you’re done, go to the streets and shops. Spread the word as fast as you can.” Students scatter through the city.

  Kaj is at the hospital; he’s been in surgery since lunch. He is consulting with his chief surgeon and looking forward to a nice cup of sugar-beet coffee when they are interrupted by one of their drivers. The driver comes in from the ambulance bay in a rush, with his cap in his hand; he tells the doctors what he has learned.

  Kaj’s surgery patient, who has just been relieved of her gallbladder, is Jewish. Kaj can’t warn or hide her; she isn’t even out of the anesthesia yet.

  The chief surgeon says, “Discharge her. Readmit her as Karen Jensen.” He asks a nurse to get him a list of every patient in the hospital.

  “Dr. Rafelsen…” says the ambulance driver, who is still standing there. “Could you come…” He leads him and Kaj out to the emergency waiting room.

  There are nine people there. Some are dressed as for the office, some for housework. Several are wearing two coats and have suitcases. One small elderly lady is in her bedroom slippers; when she couldn’t be made to understand what was wrong, her daughter and the driver had simply wrapped her up and carried her down the stairs to the ambulance.

  All these faces look from Kaj to Dr. Rafelsen and back to Kaj. This is their worst nightmare. These are mostly the newest of Jewish Danes, refugees who have already fled from somewhere else, whose Danish is not perfect, who see no reason Danes should help them when Poles or Ukrainians have been all too ready to join or lead the pogrom. They don’t have Christian friends to turn to. They have cyanide pills they will take before they go much farther. Their own fear is as dangerous to them at this point as the Gestapo.

  “What the hell is this?” asks the chief surgeon.

  “Well, they’re Jews,” says the driver.

  “But how did they get here? Have you been scooping them off the streets?”

  “No, I took a telephone book and began knocking on doors of families with Jewish names.”

  After a pause, Rafelsen says, “I guess we better get them admitted.” He shakes the hand of the gentleman nearest him. “How do you do, Mr. Nielsen. I’m sorry you’re not feeling well.” The Jews in the group who speak Danish try to explain what is happening to those who don’t.

  Kaj says, “Doctor, I have to go home for a few hours.” Dr. Rafelsen turns to him. “My parents are not feeling well either.”

  “Ah,” says Rafelsen. “Knudsen, can you take him?” As they leave, Dr. Rafelsen and his nurse are leading the band of Jews toward the maternity ward, where there are the most free beds, where they will be checked in as Nielsens and Møllers and Henningsens.

  It’s a mess. There is no organization, no one knows what to do besides get the Jews out of sight. Jews in Copenhagen with friends in Helsingør are
rushing north. Jews in Helsingør with friends in Copenhagen are passing them going the other way. Jews who don’t know where to go are paralyzed, praying, or else simply heading for the woods. If the news they’ve heard is true they have two days in which to disappear. Old ones, sick ones, mothers with young babies. And there are many who still believe it’s a big If.

  Nina is already at the apartment when Kaj arrives on Wednesday afternoon. She is sitting at the kitchen table with her parents. Neither of them is dressed for the street. Nina’s arms are extended across the table toward them, palms up, as Kaj walks in. She is pleading with them.

  All three turn to Kaj.

  Nina says, “You heard?”

  “Yes…”

  “They won’t listen.”

  “How do we know this is true?” Ditte asks her son. “There have been rumors all summer and nothing happens.”

  “Papa…” says Kaj.

  “All I’m asking is, how do you know?” said Ditte.

  “Your mother is my wife. She goes to church at Christmas and Easter. The Bings have lived in Denmark for two hundred years.”

  “I won’t go anywhere without your father,” says Ditte.

  Kaj hears the chink in this wall. She didn’t say she wouldn’t go anywhere period. “What about Tofa?” Kaj says to Henrik.

  “Tofa? Tofa is a Bing.”

  “Tofa is a Jew. So is Mama.”

  “So are you, then. Are you going somewhere?”

  There is another pause.

  “Maybe we are,” said Nina. “Right now, we have work to do.”

  “What do you mean you have work to do? You can study anywhere.”

  Henrik is joking, reflexively, because he can’t think. But Kaj is listening. He looks at Nina, and suddenly understands what work she means. Shy little Nina has done more than talk; she is working for the underground. It figures. The students all think they’re immortal.

  There is another pause.

  Kaj goes to the phone.

  “Aunt Tofa?…Fine, thanks, but Mama isn’t feeling well…That’s all I can say right now, but I’m worried that you will not be well either. Do you understand? Can you come right over?…Yes. Good. As soon as you can.”

  Then there is silence in the kitchen.

  “I’m not going anywhere without your father,” says Ditte again. “We’ll be all right here.”

  “If you won’t leave without him, he’ll go with you.”

  Kaj looks at Nina and adds, “Kjeld Bing has a sailboat…” He is thinking of Sweden. If he can get his aunt and his parents out of the house and hide them for now, they could sail to Malmö tonight. They must know someone who would take them in, hide them from the Swedish police. (But who? And how to arrange it? And what if they’re arrested there and sent back? That would be worse than if they just stayed here.)

  Kaj and Nina turn and look at Henrik. They know how profoundly he is a creature of habit. They know what comfort he takes in doing familiar things in the same way he always has. He gets up in the morning, he puts on the same slippers and sweater. He puts the same kettle on the same stove. His whole day is like that. It’s a joke in the family that Ditte can’t get him to go anywhere except the cottage in Nyborg. Where he has another sweater and pair of slippers.

  “We’ll discuss it at dinner,” he says.

  That same Wednesday evening, Niels Bohr, the physicist, takes a postprandial stroll with his wife. They walk leisurely east from home toward a part of the Sydhavn where all the streets are named for musicians. A comfortable pair in their early sixties, they make their way along a colony of kitchen gardens where city people grow flowers and vegetables. Then, from an ordinary couple enjoying an evening walk, they quietly but suddenly become instead a pair of middle-aged refugees hiding in a garden shed full of spades and trowels and manure. At this juncture no one, including Bohr himself, is entirely sure if he has seen a way to make atoms do something that could change this war and all future wars, but very many people in the world of physics believe he is close. The British have gone to elaborate lengths to get word to him that they would move heaven and earth to get him out of Denmark if he would consent to go. He would not, however.

  Bohr is well aware that the Germans have left him unusual freedom to work up to now, for their own reasons, and that sooner or later he would probably be in special danger for those same reasons. He has thought that a moment might come when his presence would be useful to Denmark. And now perhaps it has. He and his wife, thus, wait in the dark and chill and the smell of soil for the others whom the Resistance will try to smuggle out of the country tonight.

  When the rest have come and it is full dark, these twelve or so, all in danger because of their brains or their politics or whom they are related to, are led from these garden sheds to the harbor’s edge. They are made to crawl on hands and knees part of the way to stay out of sight. They board a little fishing boat, which, once they are safe below, slips north in the darkness through the narrow inner harbor, past Amelienborg and Langelinie and finally out onto the Øresund. After an hour, in midsound, the passengers are transferred to a Swedish trawler. In the small hours of Thursday morning they arrive in Limhamn harbor in Sweden and are taken to spend the rest of the night in the best-defended place their handlers could think of in Malmö: the cells at the police station. Bohr is out of Denmark but by no means safe. The Germans will know in short order that he has escaped, and would certainly rather have him dead than working for the Allies.

  On Thursday morning, Henrik and Ditte Moss and Tofa Bing agree that they might consider sailing off to Sweden with Kjeld Bing, but it is too late. The Germans have ordered all pleasure boats out of the water. Even rowboats are to be carried one thousand feet inland and left there. They wish they had listened to the children the night before. Frightened and chastened, they are listening now.

  In the seaside village of Hornbæk, on the northeast shore of Zealand, above Helsingør, there is a beautiful beach of powder sand. Parts of the coast there are not at all unlike Dundee, Maine, with fishermen’s cottages and a small white church, and grander houses belonging to summer visitors discreetly ranked among dunes and under great shade trees. One of these summer houses belongs to a family called Bennike, great music lovers from Copenhagen. They once gave a memorable party to introduce the young pianist Laurus Moss to the cognoscenti. Laurus played a Chopin Ballade, the fourth, and people talked about it for years, the colors in his pianissimo. Later, Kaj Moss was briefly an unsuccessful suitor of the daughter of the house. On Thursday morning, September 30, Kaj pays a call at their flat in Copenhagen. Kaj has no idea in what regard the family holds him since Elisabeth made it clear that her affections lay elsewhere. This is not a comfortable visit for him to make, on any level. Still.

  Later in the morning, but while there is still a sheen of normality on the Copenhagen day, Henrik and Ditte Moss and Tofa Bing, dressed for travel and each with a small suitcase, board a train for Helsingør. There are German soldiers in the station, and on the train, but nothing happens that hasn’t happened a hundred times since the occupation began. Ditte and Henrik hold hands, and Tofa looks out the window, memorizing the landscape.

  Her sister, who can sometimes read her mind, touches her and says, “We’ll be home on Monday.”

  They arrive uneventfully, and as they’ve been told to, find a certain café near the Helsingør train station, and order their lunch. There have been quite a number of families on the train north, for a Thursday, many with dark hair and clothes and anxious expressions, and through the café windows these can be seen passing, looking lost.

  There were taxis at the station, but Kaj had warned them not to take one; they don’t want to be traced to where they were going. This was after Kaj had subdued Henrik’s insurrection in which he decided they should go back to Nyborg instead.

  “The cottage is on the sea. If we have to we’ll leave from there.”

  “Papa—it’s the wrong direction. You’re not going toward Germany, you’
re going toward Sweden. Period.”

  “But—”

  “No.”

  They have finished eating and paid their bill, and are wondering how long they can sit without attracting attention, when a tall young man with long brown hair, none too clean, and a remarkably prominent Adam’s apple, approaches with a jaunty air.

  “Henrik Moss?” he says. “I’m Per.” They shake hands all around. This is the eccentric oldest son of the Bennike family, whom none of them had met. He’d been in France “pretending to be a painter” (Elisabeth’s phrase) before the war. He came home when Poland was invaded, talking vaguely of joining the navy, but he’d dithered; then Denmark was occupied and the military idled. Per had hung about Copenhagen rather enjoying life until his father quarreled with him about it; then he departed for Hornbæk and the empty summer house. He said he would write a novel.

  Per has made many useful friends and acquaintances in cafés and bars from Gilleleje to Helsingør, while he waited for inspiration. He has a car waiting for them in an alley behind the restaurant.

  “You have gasoline?” Henrik asks in surprise.

  “No. A friend helped me convert it. It runs on hay.”

  It does not run very fast. But it does run, and in a half hour’s time they arrive in Hornbæk, at the back door of a handsome summer house on a lane on the inland side of the beach road. The houses on either side of it are shut for the season. Nevertheless, Per urges his guests to stay inside. He installs them in adjoining upstairs bedrooms, takes their ration books, and goes out to buy groceries.