Aage lit his pipe and stared at the picture of Karen on his desk. He sighed.
“I am not giving her up,” Meta said.
“We have no right…”
“It is different. She is not a Danish Jew. We have records to show she is our child.”
Aage put his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Someone in Aalborg may inform the Germans.”
“They won’t go to that trouble for one child.”
“Don’t you know these people by now?”
Meta turned around. “We will have her baptized and adopt her legally.”
Aage shook his head slowly. His wife slumped into a chair and bit her lip. She clutched the arms of the chair so tightly her hand turned white. “What will happen, Aage?”
“They are organizing to get all the Jewish people up to the Zealand beaches near the straits. We are purchasing as many boats as we can to make runs over to Sweden. The Swedes have sent word that they will accept everyone and provide for them.”
“How many nights I have lain awake and thought of this. I have tried to tell myself that she is in greater danger if she must flee. I tell myself over and over that she is safer here with us.”
“Think of what you are saying, Meta.”
The woman looked at her husband with an expression of anguish and determination he had never seen from her before. “I will never give her up, Aage. I cannot live without her.”
Every Dane who was called upon cooperated in a gigantic effort. The entire Jewish population of Denmark was whisked secretly north to Zealand and smuggled to the safety of Sweden.
Later that month the Germans made a sweep of Denmark to catch the Jews. There were none to be caught.
Although Karen remained unharmed in Copenhagen with the Hansens the responsibility of the decision weighed heavily on Meta. From that second on the German occupation became a prolonged nightmare. A dozen new rumors would send her into a panic. Three or four times she fled from Copenhagen with Karen to relatives on Jutland.
Aage became more and more active in the underground. He was gone three or four nights a week now. These nights were long and horrible for Meta.
The Danish underground, now directed and coordinated, turned its energies against German transportation. Every half hour a rail line was bombed. Soon the entire rail network of the country was littered with the wreckage of blasted
trains.
The HIPOS took their revenge by blowing up the beloved
Tivoli Gardens.
The Danes called a general strike against the Germans.
They poured into the streets and set up barricades all over Copenhagen flying Danish, American, British, and Russian flags.
The Germans declared Copenhagen in a state of siege!
From German headquarters at the Hotel D’Angleterre, Dr. Werner Best shrieked in fury, “The rabble of Copenhagen shall taste the whip!”
The general strike, was beaten down, but the underground kept up its acts of destruction.
SEPTEMBER 19, 1944
The Germans interned the entire Danish police force for failing to control the people and for overt sympathy with their actions against the occupation forces. The underground, in a daring raid, destroyed the Nazi record offices.
The underground manufactured small arms and smuggled fighters into Sweden to join Danish Free Forces. It turned its wrath on the HIPOS, dispensing quick justice to spoe of its members and to Danish traitors.
The HIPOS and the Gestapo went berserk in an aimless wave of reprisal murders.
Then German refugees began pouring over the border into Denmark. These were people bombed out by the Allies. They swarmed all over the country, taking food and shelter without asking; stealing and preying on the Danes. The Danes turned their backs on these refugees with utter contempt.
In April 1945 there were all sorts of rumors.
MAY 4,1945 “Mommy! Daddy! The war is over! The war is over!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The victors entered Denmark-the Yanks and the British and the Danish Free Forces. It was a great week-a week of retribution to the HIPOS and the Danish traitors, to Dr. Werner Best and the Gestapo. A week of din and delirious joy, climaxed by the appearance of creaking old King Christian to reopen the Danish Parliament. He spoke in a proud but tired voice which broke with emotion.
For Meta and Aage Hansen the week of the liberation was a time of sorrow. Seven years before they had rescued a child from grave danger and they had raised her into a blossoming young woman. What a lovely girl she was! Karen was grace and beauty and laughter. Her voice was pure and sweet and she danced with magic wings on her feet. Now: the Day of Judgment.
Once in a fit of anguish Meta Hansen had sworn she would
never give Karen up. Now Meta Hansen was becoming a victim of her own decency. There were no Germans left to fight now, only her own Christian goodness. And Aage would fall victim, as he had to, to his Danish sense of honor. Liberation brought upon them a fear of the haunted nights and the life of emptiness that lay ahead of them without Karen. The Hansens had aged badly during the last seven years. It was apparent the moment they were allowed to relax from the tension of war. No matter how trying things had been there had always been room for laughter, but now while Denmark laughed there was no laughter for them. The Hansens wanted only to look at Karen, hear her voice, spend the hours in her room in a desperate attempt to gather for themselves a lifetime of memories.
Karen knew it was coming. She loved the Hansens. Aage had always done what was right. She had to wait for him to speak first. For two weeks after the liberation the gloom thickened. At last, one evening after another wordless meal Aage rose from the table and put down his napkin. His kindly face was wrinkled and his voice a listless monotone. “We must try to find your parents, Karen. It is the thing to do.” He walked from the room quickly. Karen looked to the empty doorway and then to Meta across the table.
“I love you,” Karen said, and ran to her room and threw herself on the bed and sobbed, hating herself for bringing this sorrow on them. And now she was hating herself for another reason. She wanted to learn about her past. In a few more days they sought out the International Refugee Organization.
“This is my foster daughter,” Aage said.
The case worker had been on her job only the few weeks since the liberation, but already she was becoming sick at the sight of couples like the Hansens and Karen. Day after day the woman was being forced to become a party to tragedy. In Denmark and Holland, in Sweden and Belgium and France, couples like the Hansens who had hidden and sheltered and raised children were now stepping forward to receive their bitter reward.
“You must be prepared for a long and difficult task. There are millions of displaced people in Europe. We have absolutely no idea how long it is going to take to reunite families.”
They left with her all the known facts, a list of all the known relatives, and the letters. Karen had a large family and her father had been a prominent man. The woman gave them a little hope.
A week passed, and two, and then three. June-July. Months of torture for Aage and Meta. They would stand in
the doorway of Karen’s room more and more often. It was frilly and soft and it smelled good. There were her ice skates and her ballet slippers and pictures of classmates and prima ballerinas. There was a picture of her beau, the Petersen boy.
At last they were called to the Refugee Organization. “We are faced with the fact,” the woman ‘said, “that all our initial inquiries have turned up nothing. This is not to be taken as conclusive. It means a long hard task. Were it my own decision I would absolutely forbid Karen to travel to Germany alone or even with Mr. Hansen. There is utter chaos inside Germany and you won’t find a thing that we can’t do from here.” The woman looked squarely at the three of them. “I must warn you about one thing. We have been receiving more and more reports each day that something pretty hideous has happened. Many Jews have been put to death. It is beginning to look as though the numbers may run into the millions.”