Wildflowers of Terezin (23 page)

On the other hand, she almost had to laugh at the idea of seeing Aron hiding under a hold of fish, as some of their refugees had already been forced to do. Aron, who hated the thought of getting his hands dirty or his ties wrinkled. Aron, who always had to be in control of his own agenda, as well as the agendas of everyone around him. For a moment she wondered how he might be holding up under the stress of these past days. It would certainly not be good for his high blood pressure.

I'm sorry, Mor,
she thought as she turned off toward one of the tunnel entrances.
It's not going to happen.

And under no circumstances would she entertain the idea of escaping to Sweden with Aron Overgaard. Not while she had anything to say about it.

Among other things, right now she needed to check on the medication of one of the little girls down there who was suffering from asthma. Who else cared about these people the way she did? Living and sleeping in a damp basement did nothing to help the poor little girl's condition, and she should be moved as soon as possible.

But now came the hard part: deciding who would stay, and who would be able to escape today. She hoped it might not be a permanent decision, and she assumed everyone would eventually be allowed a chance. At least the money she and Steffen had gathered would help.

But still Hanne sighed and leaned against the metal stair railing, gathering strength to go downstairs with the kind of cheery face and attitude the refusees needed. So Steffen thought she was determined, did he? He had no idea how much she quivered inside and would not recognize her bleak doubt if it hit him in the face.

Determined? Maybe. But she wondered how the unenviable job of playing God had fallen on her shoulders.

BISPEBJERG HOSPITAL, KØBENHAVN

TUESDAY EVENING, 5 OKTOBER 1943

If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?

—ALEKSANDR I. SOLZHENITSYN

A
ll right, now!" Hanne held up her hands and tried not to bump her head on the ambulance ceiling. "I need everyone's attention, please."

Six frightened refugees huddled in back behind the curtain separating the driver from the rest of the ambulance.They'd arranged for a grandmother and her son, his wife, and three young teens—a boy and two girls. If they could have fit more, they would have.

Steffen kept the vehicle idling, and a wary eye out for any approaching traffic. While still in the Bispebjerg parking area, however, she assumed they were safe. Perhaps. For now. She turned to the driver. "Steffen?"

"Yes, right." Steffen cleared his throat. "Hanne is going to dress you kids up a bit for the trip."

Hanne held up her jar of theatrical blood as he continued explaining.

"This is the same thing that actors paint on their faces or limbs. Dramatic, like Herod and Cleopatra in
The Idealist."

No one reacted.

"You know, Kaj Munk?" Steffen softened his voice a bit."You've heard of his plays, haven't you?"

Their blank looks betrayed the fact that this audience might never have heard of the Danish pastor and dramatist.

"Oh, well." He shrugged. "Doesn't matter. All you need to know is that if we're stopped, you adults under the blanket need to keep completely still, and you three with the makeup just need to groan a bit and look injured. Got it?"

This time the young actors nodded seriously, because their lives depended on it. Hanne dipped a wooden tongue depressor into the jar of sticky, oozing red and nodded to her first victim.

"You've got a head injury from an accident with a delivery truck," she told the boy, who looked perhaps thirteen or fourteen. "Or how about with a bus? Can you do this? Let me hear you groan."

The boy looked around at the others, as if embarrassed.

"Come on." Hanne dabbed a little more blood on the boy's forehead. "A little louder. You're in pain!"

So he finally complied, but didn't seem nearly as enthusiastic as his sister. If anything, she carried the groaning thing a little too far.

"All right, perfect." Hanne ripped the collar of his shirt a bit for good measure. His mother would thank her, later."You're going to get a job in the movies when this is all over."

Hanne finished painting the faces and arms of her three patients—the boy who winced whenever she applied another dab of red, and his two sisters. "Two of you lay down, and one try to sit up. Remember, you're seriously injured."

She looked up at Steffen, hoping this idea didn't turn out to be as crazy as it seemed. All they needed was for one thing to go wrong.

He nodded back at them. "Let's go?"

He placed the ambulance in gear, jerking only a little, and eased them away from the loading area and out to the wide
Tuborgvej,
Tuborg Road. Their only problem was obvious.Because instead of heading toward the hospital, now they headed away, toward another rendezvous on the coast.Steffen looked nervously in his mirrors as he steered north and east.

"What am I going to say if we do get stopped?" he wondered aloud. Hanne couldn't think of a good answer.

So they drove on in silence, tension in the air. No one made a sound except the occasional nervous cough. With six Jewish refugees in the back of their ambulance, anything could happen. And as they sped down Tuborgvej in the direction of the coast, Hanne almost wasn't surprised when they slowed to a stop on the outskirts of Gentofte, on the northern outskirts.

"What's going on?" asked one of the sisters. "Why are we stopping?"

Hanne turned to them again.

"I see a couple of soldiers up ahead, checking traffic.Remember, you're in pain. But don't overdo it."

A little voice came from the teenage boy, propped up next to the two who lay across a single stretcher.

"I think we should sound the siren," he said. "Maybe we'll get away more quickly."

Hanne looked over at Steffen, who clenched his teeth.

"Or maybe we'll get noticed a little more quickly," he added.

They needn't have worried about being noticed. A moment later, two German guards marched up and demanded to see their identification.

"
Papieren, bitte,"
barked the first soldier, holding out his hand and snapping a finger with impatience. He couldn't have been more than twenty years old.

"We're transporting these people," Steffen told them, sounding rather panicked. "It's an emergency!"

So it was. A second guard came up from the other side and shined his flashlight at them. Hanne did her best to appear frantic as she wrapped the boy's arm in a gauze bandage. She was careful to squeeze a large puddle of the costume blood out at just the right time.

"We've got to get them to this hospital, quickly!" Hanne told them, adding as much urgency as she dared. "It looks like they're losing too much blood!"

She nudged the boy, who gave an appropriately soft groan.Good. Even so, the guard seemed to take his time examining their identification papers, each folded into a small pouch, like a passport. He held up Steffen's to the light of his flashlight, comparing the real face from his passport.

"I didn't know pastors drove ambulances," said the young German. "This is not Falck?"

Of course the German would know about Falck, the Danish rescue and fire service. Maybe he'd never seen any other kind of ambulance.

"No," Steffen replied with a straight face. "It's a private service for the hospital. You know what I mean, of course."

Of course. Perhaps the guard would not know there was no such thing. And as he next turned to Hanne's I.D. and frowned at it in the light from his torch.

"You are a nurse at Bispebjerg, Miss Hansen?"

Hanne almost had to force herself to respond to her new "Danish" name, but managed to nod as she held to her patient's wrist and counted the pulse. The boy's heart was racing, by the way, but for the same reason as was her own.

"Really, this is an emergency," insisted Steffen, his voice agitated. "Surely you can see. We must be on our way."

"To the hospital?" asked the guard.

"Yes, yes." Steffen made a show of placing the car back into gear with a terrible grinding noise, then stalled the ambulance.

"Then you are heading the wrong direction." The German pointed back at the way they had come.

"What?" When Steffen gasped, Hanne knew he didn't know what to say next. So Hanne turned back and made a show of desperation, waving her hands angrily and slapping Steffen on the shoulder.

"You idiot!" She raised her voice to a yell. "I told you to turn left, but you said you knew where you were going! I knew we shouldn't have listened to you! And now look what's happened! Someone's going to die back here because of your stubbornness."

Hanne wasn't completely sure if the Germans followed every word of her rapid-fire Danish, but she knew they would understand her tone. And sure enough, the nearest guard stared at the exchange and burst out laughing. A moment later he motioned for two more guards to come join in the joke.

"Very funny," whispered Steffen, under his breath. "Now can we get out of here, please?"

Still the Germans seemed in no particular hurry. But after some discussion and chuckling the other two finally backed away, returning to their posts by the side of the road, while the first guard slowly handed back their cards, and Steffen restarted the stalled ambulance.

"Well," he told the German, "we'll just be going, then."

"Nein!" The guard grabbed Steffen's steering wheel before they could get away, then pointed to himself and his nearby motorcycle. "I know where is the hospital. You will follow me now. Verstehen sie? Understand?"

What else could Steffen do but nod? Still laughing, the guard stepped over to his cycle, started it up, and waved through a cloud of exhaust for them to follow. Steffen quickly rolled up his window while their passengers groaned. But Hanne patted her patient.

"You can stop groaning, for now," she told him. But she wanted to groan herself as Steffen turned the ambulance in the middle of the road and obeyed the guard's directive, heading back the way they came.

"What are we going to do now?" she wondered, trying to make out the time on her watch. "We can't go back to the hospital. We need to have these people to the beach at Tårbæk in less than an hour. They may not get another chance."

"I know all that." Now Steffen set his jaw as they followed the helpful soldier through the outskirts of the city, back the wrong way. He pressed his lips together as they passed through Skovshoved toward a major roundabout.

And then without warning he yanked the wheel over, sending them spinning through the roundabout, around a corner, and into an unmarked alley.

"Hold on!" he told them, though it might have been more useful if he'd said so a moment earlier. As it was, Hanne flew out of her front seat, nearly ending up on Steffen's lap.Everyone in back tumbled at least as much as they cried out.But Steffen accelerated through the darkness, screeching around yet another corner, and flying out into the clear.