Escape conjures up dramatic movie images of prisoners chipping away at cell block walls, or a daring dive off the deck of a swiftly moving vessel. It was only recently that I met a couple who had actually undergone an escape. The people were improbable participants and the circumstances one reads about in history books, but there it was, an actual escape and escapees.
A friend of mine had invited me over for lunch one Saturday afternoon and mentioned that his wife’s grandparents would be visiting as well. Both past ninety, they had traveled on a bus from Lakewood, N.J. to Brooklyn, a daunting journey for people of that age. They looked well, with firm walk, steady voices and gaze, not young but comfortably and gracefully old. We chatted in the living room. Their accent was elusive to classify and I asked them where they were from.
“Denmark,” the wife replied. “I am Danish”.
I told them about my trip to Copenhagen two years prior, the cold but pretty city I wandered in, the nice coffee shops that I took refuge in during snow, the impossible to read language.
“When did you leave?” I asked.
“We left twice,” the grandfather responded. “Once in 1943, and then, after we returned, once again, in 1950 to come here”.
My friend’s wife was setting the table and interjected, “Tell them, Opa, how you escaped.”
The two old people smiled. It didn’t take much urging; it was a story they liked to tell.
The couple had been married just prior to the German occupation of Denmark in 1940. The Jewish community of Copenhagen was small, and everyone knew everyone else. He was the son of the rabbi of the smaller of the two congregations in town, newly returned from a stint studying in a yeshiva in Poland and now attending college to learn accounting. She ran a Jewish lending library in her parent’s home, and coming to borrow a book, he had fallen for the librarian. Each book was returned with a love note inserted between the pages, book and note leading to walks, engagement and marriage. Their wedding photo was on the wall of my friend’s home, solemn young folks staring into a camera long ago.
The sudden occupation of the country left them frightened. Christian friends remained friends. When the law mandating yellow stars was enacted, their friends and even the king, who rode a horse through the capital every day to rally his people, put on the armbands too.
The day before Rosh Hashanah, 1943, a German occupation official tipped off the resistance that all Jews would be arrested the next day and deported. The holiday would make round ups easy, with the prey at home or in synagogue. Everyone was told to hide, but no one had a place to hide.
“But where,” the grandmother remembered, “Where to go?” Copenhagen was filled with German soldiers, Gestapo, and Danish collaborators who would betray whomever they could. Parents and newlyweds decided to get out of the city and see if the farmer from whom they rented a cottage each summer near the Swedish coast would help.
“We hired a cab,” she continued. “My husband was dark and looked Jewish. I told him to lie down on the cab floor in the back, and spread a blanket over him. I was blond, beautiful and Aryan looking, so I knew I would fool the Germans.” The photo on the wall said otherwise, but I listened and said nothing.
The cab drove through the crowded streets of the city, filled with German soldiers, tense from rising attacks by the Danish underground. The soldiers were a few feet from the cab windows, and could have easily stopped the vehicle. It was an eerie feeling, drawing so close to men who could so easily send you to your death. The driver drove carefully and slowly, to attract no attention and give no pretext for stopping. They got out of the city and sped along quiet country roads.
At the farm, they knocked at the house door and the summer landlady opened up. “Can we stay?” and the unexpected visitors explained what was happening in the capital.
“Come in,” the landlady told them. “No one will take you out of my house.”
The coast was near, and in the next few days groups of Jews found hiding places in barns, in cellars, in church attics, waiting for a way to travel the waters between their dangerous homes and Sweden. The landlady found a fisherman, who for a price agreed to make the journey. He came late at night, and the three couples walked with him through woods.
“It was so quiet and frightening as we walked,” the grandmother recalled. “I wanted to cry, but I knew it would make it worse for the others. The fisherman walked along with us, singing to keep up our spirits. I asked him if he was frightened. ‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘Even if I was going to my death, what a glorious way to die!’ ”
The little boat was at the water’s edge. The families got in and set sail for the coast of refuge. German boats were patrolling, but somehow the fisherman maneuvered around them. The German navy lights shone in the night, renewing fear of capture, but nothing happened. The Germans could have easily stopped the many small boats ferrying frightened Jews to safety, but none did. Historians have speculated that the German commander ordered that the escapes go unimpeded; to give him cover at the end of a war he already realized was lost.
“We sailed for hours, with the fisherman singing. We sat quietly and prayed that we would get through.”
In the morning, the boat pulled in to the shores of Sweden, with groups of people standing at the water’s edge and calling, “Welcome! Welcome to Sweden.”
Somehow, they lived as penniless refugees, subsisting on the charity of the Swedish government and the small Jewish community of the country. At war’s end they returned home; houses safeguarded by neighbors and lives ready to be resumed. Life had brought them now, so many years later to a small living room in Brooklyn, remembering their escape.
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