The Rotters' Club (15 page)

‘I don’t know what they teach you in your history lessons these days, but every Danish schoolchild knows that the Germans invaded Denmark in April 1940, and from that time until the end of the War, this was an occupied country. I will not say that it was a terrible time to be a Jew – the really terrible time came later – but it was very difficult. There was no real persecution at first, but it was always in the air, as a threat. There were Gestapo men on every street. Many households had German officers billeted on them. Some Jewish families changed their names. Nobody fled, at first, because there was nowhere to flee to. Germany to the south, occupied Norway to the north. You could not get to Britain, because the Germans were patrolling the seas. Only Sweden remained neutral, but it had given no sign that it would open its borders to Danish Jews.

‘Inger left school when she was sixteen, in the summer of 1943. She started to earn some money waiting tables in a café in the town square, but had not yet decided what she was going to do with herself. It was impossible to plan for the future anyway. Everything in her life was uncertain: except for one thing. She was in love with a man. A man called Emil. He was the son of one of my husband’s friends, a local doctor. Also a Jew. She had known Ernil for less than a year but she loved him with the intensity that only a very young girl is capable of. And he was very handsome, actually. Here. Here is a photo.’

She took down a small unframed black and white photograph from the mantelpiece and handed it to me. I sensed that it was not usually kept on display; that she had retrieved it today from some long unvisited drawer or album specifically to show to us. We passed it around carefully, handling it as if it were a sacred relic. Two young people, a man and a woman, sat on a wooden bench in the arbour of a rose garden and gaz.ed at the camera. They had their arms around each other, cheek to cheek, and were smiling blissfully. I suppose there must be hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of photographs like this in existence. It was hard to say what was so special about this one, except that there was something about the lovers’ smiles that made it more than just the record of one passing moment in time. There was nothing transitory, nothing evanescent about those smiles. There was an agelessness about the picture. I felt that it could have been taken yesterday.

‘Here. Here is another.’

This time the lovers were sitting at a table in a café – perhaps the one where Inger had used to work – and there was a third person in the frame with them. A tall, burly, fair-haired man in uniform.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

‘His name was Bernhard. He was a German officer, who was staying with a family just along the street from us.’

Emil and Inger were again looking at the camera. Bernhard was looking half at the camera, and half at them. The intimacy between them was violated, this time, partly by the way he looked at them, and partly by his very presence. It was an eloquent photograph. It told its unhappy story concisely, and without ambiguity.

‘As you can see from this picture, Bernhard had feelings for Inger. He had met her at the café but also before that when she was still at school. Because she was a Jew and because of what he had been told to believe about Jews it made things worse. He must have hated himself for the way he felt about her, and hated her too, in some sense. It was a very bad situation. And of course he couldn’t bear the fact that she was in love with Emil, another Jew. Many times he had made advances to my daughter, and she turned him away. Once… Inger never told me the whole story, but he was violent towards her. I don’t think he actually raped her, he was not quite an animal in that way, but it was an ugly scene. Humiliating for him, one imagines. But it didn’t turn him against her. He kept bringing her flowers, chocolates, stupid things like that. It was Emil that he was determined to punish. Emil was beaten quite badly in the street one night and I have always thought that Bernhard might have been responsible for that.

‘And then, in October 1943, everything changed. An order came from Germany to say that the presence of the Jews in Denmark was no longer to be tolerated. We were to be arrested and shipped to the concentration camps. The Gestapo were planning to raid all Jewish homes throughout Denmark on the nights of October Ist and 2nd.

‘The story of the rescue of the Danish Jews is quite famous. It was a proud moment in the history of this country. Word of the German plans was somehow passed to Danish politicians and a clandestine rescue operation began. Jewish congregations were warned of the action that was about to be taken against them and the vast majority went into hiding. The Danish people behaved heroically. They offered sanctuary and hiding places to Jewish people whom they hardly knew. Hospitals and churches were converted into places where large numbers of people could stay undetected. Then the news began to spread that King Gustav of Sweden had made an announcement, declaring himself opposed to the German action and saying that Sweden would give shelter to all Danish Jews who could find their way to his country. This was the first glimmer of hope. The problem was how to get to Sweden.

‘Julius and Inger and I had fled to the country, packing as many of our belongings into the car as we could. We took two of Emil’s sisters with us, and the rest of his family followed in another car a few hours later. He had three sisters. And then, for many days, we were hiding out in barns and farm buildings in the middle of the countryside. We had no idea what was happening to our homes, whether they had been raided or whether the Germans would come looking for us. They were dreadful days, days of unspeakable terror and anxiety. Except that for Inger and Emil, although they knew the danger they were in, I think there might have been some happiness as well. To sleep under the same roof. To be together in adversity. It sounds a silly thing to say but I think this might have been the case. Things are like that when you are young.

‘We waited more than a week for news. Emil’s father managed to make telephone contact with some people in Copenhagen who were involved in the resistance and in helping to co-ordinate the rescue of the Jews. At last we were told that if we could make our way to the east coast, north of Copenhagen, there were boats sailing to Sweden from many of the fishing villages there. The details were very vague. It was not clear how big the boats were, or when they were sailing, or whether the fishermen were asking for money to take people across. But we had to take our chance. There was no time to lose. The German High Command was furious that so few of the Jews had been seized, and they were instructing their officers to intensify the search all over the country. And it’s true, the Gestapo had been very ineffective, up to this point. They had turned a blind eye to a lot of the people escaping. Bribes were changing hands. They did not really have the stomach for this operation.

‘Julius and Emil’s father decided that we should attempt to drive to the east coast the next night. We would set out at ten o’clock.’

Marie poured some more tea, for herself and for all of us. I noticed that her hand was shaking a little now, as she held the teapot. It had been perfectly steady before.

‘The route we chose was a little dangerous,’ she continued. ‘It meant passing through the outskirts of our town. That was one of the mistakes we made. The other was that we did not keep our families together. There was no room for Emil, and his mother and father, and his three sisters, and their belongings, all in the same car. His sisters should have travelled with us, as before. That might have been better. But Inger and Emil wanted to be together, and so it was they who travelled with Julius and myself. They sat in the back of our car.

‘By ten-thirty we had almost passed through the outskirts of our town and it seemed that the first moment of danger might be over. Then we saw that Emil’s father, who was driving the car in front, had been stopped in the middle of the road. There were four German officers and they were making him get out of the car and they were shining torches on to the faces of his family. Julius put on the brakes at once and said that we should turn back. There was still time to turn back and try another route. But I stopped him and said, Look. You see what they are doing. And Julius looked and he could see that Emil’s father was handing money over to the German officers. It’s all right, I said, all they want is a bribe. We have money, don’t we? And Julius said, Yes, we have money, but not that much.

‘Now Emil’s father was still talking to three of the officers, and giving them money, when the fourth one walked away from the group and came over to our car. It was Bernhard. He recognized us at once and he took out his torch and he shined it on to each of our faces in turn. He shined it on to Emil’s face for a long time. He didn’t say anything when he did this, but I could see into his eyes and I knew there was a wicked sort of pleasure there and that everything was going to go wrong and something terrible was about to happen.

‘Julius said to him, Well, what do you want? Do you want money?, and Bernhard told us all to get out of the car. My heart was pounding as I climbed out but I was also aware that something was happening in the road ahead with Emil’s father. The Germans had finished their business with him and they were telling him to be on his way as quickly as possible. I could see that he wanted to wait for our car but they wouldn’t let him. Then one of them threatened him with a gun and Emil’s father looked back at us and made some movement with his hand, some kind of gesture, and then he got into the car and they drove away. One of the Germans fired a gun into the air as they left and it was a hideous sound, so loud, so shocking, in the middle of the night in that quiet little town. It was starting to rain.

‘Now Bernhard had got the four of us, me, Julius, Inger and Emil, all lined up against the car and he said to my husband, How much money have you got? And Julius had to open a suitcase and count all our money and there was just three thousand kroner. So when Bernhard heard that this was all the money we had, he smiled and said, Well, we want four thousand kroner. One thousand for each person. I knew that this was not what they had asked from Emil’s father, I knew that he had just made this figure up because he could see that we didn’t have enough money. But there was nothing we could do. He took all our money and told us to get back in the car and for a moment I thought this meant that he was going to show mercy. But just as Emil was getting into the car he put his gun against his chest and said, No. Not you.

‘By now the other three officers had come over to see what was happening and I heard Bernhard say to them in German, Just this one. And then Inger realized what he was doing and she began screaming and crying. She was saying, No, not my Emil, and…

‘Well, I think you can imagine what she was saying.’

Marie fell silent. We waited for her to tell us the rest of the story. Paul put his plate back on the table. His pastry was only half-eaten.

‘I don’t think I can talk to you about what happened in the next few hours. I can remember what it was like, but I cannot describe it. The noises that Inger was making, the things –

‘Well. To continue. We reached the coast at about two o’clock in the morning. A little port called Humlebaek. Only Emil’s father was waiting for us there. His wife and daughters had sailed on a boat about one hour previously. He had stayed behind, to wait for Emil. When he realized that Emil was not with us, he was… distraught. There was another boat waiting to take the rest of us away. It was a very black night, there was no moon. We were huddled on the beach, there were about twenty of us. The boat could not wait much longer. I remember Julius took Emil’s father aside and they had a long discussion. An argument. They were both shouting. Inger was not saying anything by this time, she was completely silent. After a while Emil’s father and my husband came back and then we all climbed into the fishing boat and at last the captain could sail away. It was a long voyage. Very uncomfortable, I remember. We reached Sweden after dawn.’

Marie sat back in her chair and took some long breaths. Julius was not looking at her any more. He was still leaning on his stick, but his eyes were closed. There was no noise at all in the room, only the murmur of the waves outside.

‘There were eight thousand Jews in Denmark in the summer of 1943,’ Marie told us. ‘Nearly all of them escaped to safety, thanks to the courage and the high principles of the Danish people. Just a few hundred were left behind. Emil was one of them.

‘The captured Jews were taken back to Germany and then to concentration camps in Czechoslovakia. Some of them committed suicide on the way. I always thought that Emil might have done that. I don’t know why, it was just a feeling that I had. Inger never believed it. She always believed that he was alive.

‘We lived for two years in Sweden, not very happy years, as you can imagine, and at the end of the War we returned to Denmark. We came back to the same house. It was empty, and waiting for us. Inger was eighteen by now. She waited a few weeks for news of Emil and then she disappeared.

‘She was away for many years. She never told us about that time but I know that she went to Czechoslovakia first and then she spent a long time in Germany and other places trying to find out what had happened to Emil. I think she might also have been looking for Bernhard, but again, this is just a suspicion on my part. In any case, she never found either of them. Not a trace of Emil. I knew that she wouldn’t. He had died long ago, one way or another. There could be no doubt about that.

‘After all she had been through, we knew, Julius and I, that our daughter would never be able to lead a completely normal life. The loss she had suffered was very great. To be so young, and so very deeply in love, and then to have that love… uprooted, in a word, swept away by forces over which you can have no possible control, historical forces… You can never recover from something like that, never reconcile yourself to it.’

She sipped her tea, which must by now have been quite cold. I was thinking of Lois and Malcolm, and I swallowed hard.