Leeway Cottage

by Beth Gutcheon

  In Sweden, this Thursday, Niels Bohr arrives in Stockholm. He is met by an intelligence officer of the Swedish General Staff and by Volmer Gyth, a Danish intelligence officer working with SOE, one of the Princes. Gyth and his colleagues escaped when the government fell, to continue their work from Sweden. Now Gyth’s special charge from London is to get Bohr to England. He announces that an unarmed RAF Mosquito bomber will be in Stockholm Friday morning to take Bohr to safety.

  Bohr says, “No,” politely but firmly. He is happy to be out of Denmark himself, but that is hardly the end of the matter. What will happen to the rest of Denmark’s Jews? He isn’t going anywhere until Sweden agrees to offer them all sanctuary.

  Gyth, heart in mouth, takes Bohr to the home of some friends where he can spend the night. He installs one policeman inside the house, another outside the door, and a third patrolling up and down on the street beyond. He hopes it’s enough.

  In Hornbæk, in the house in the lane Granvaenget, the evening passes in quiet discomfort. Per cooks supper, and after they eat, they all listen to the BBC broadcast on the radio in his room. Everyone goes to bed early, and no one sleeps very well.

  Friday morning Per is already gone when Ditte and Henrik get up. Tofa is in the kitchen assembling breakfast. When Per comes back, he has two more families with him.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Moss, Miss Bing—this is the family Roth and the family Saloman. You’ll have to introduce yourselves.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Roth are Orthodox Jews. Mr. Roth wears a full beard; Mrs. Roth’s hair is covered with a wig. The children, three girls and a boy, are wide-eyed and quiet, though they shake hands politely. They have spent the night in St. Olaf ’s Domkirke in Helsingør, and have had nothing to eat since they left Copenhagen. Mr. Saloman is a classics teacher; his wife is a dentist. Their children are identical twin girls named Hanne and Inge. They are blond and extremely pretty and seem to speak only to each other.

  In Sweden, on this Friday morning, October 1, Bohr is ushered in to see Ernst Gunther, Sweden’s foreign minister. Minister Gunther expresses how glad he is that the famous Dane is on his way to safety and Bohr expresses that he isn’t going anywhere until Sweden has promised to open its doors to the Danish Jews.

  Gunther says, Well, of course, they could do that, if the Germans say it’s all right. He will telegraph to Berlin for permission. It is very important that Sweden preserve her neutrality, which she cannot do while working one side against the other. This must be clear to Bohr…

  When they’ve been ushered out, the handlers say, “Well now,” to Dr. Bohr. “London?”

  Bohr is angry. He says no. Asking if it would be all right with the Reich if they rescue seven thousand Danish Jews is not what Bohr is asking for.

  (Oddly enough, Minister Gunther never does get a reply from Berlin on this matter.)

  No. No London. Aha. Then…what?

  Bohr wants to see the king. And anyone else who can do something useful.

  Oh. He wants to see the king. Meanwhile, there are plenty of German agents in Stockholm, and the longer he is here, the more people will know it.

  After Per has sorted out where everyone will sleep—there is a sort of children’s dormitory on the third floor where all the girls can go, and the Roth boy will sleep with his father—the morning passes tensely but rather pleasantly. The Roth children are fascinated by the house, and shyly thrilled when Per urges them to explore at will. They go in and out of closets, they emerge wearing Mr. Bennike’s hats and shoes. Per goes out for more groceries; this takes time, as he has to go to several different stores, so it will not be so obvious that he is feeding so many. Mr. Roth (they pronounce their name Rote, with a long o and a slight burr at the t) is rather frightened about Per, who seems to him blithe and feckless for one who holds their lives in his hands.

  When Per comes in at lunchtime, he has fresh eggs from a neighbor’s hens, among other things. Sylvie Roth looks as if she might cry at the sight. Per asks Henrik to come outside with him while the women make smørrebrød. He tells Henrik that there are strangers arriving on every train, but Gestapo Juhl, a detested Nazi from southern Jutland, has also arrived in Helsingør. “I have keys to other summer houses; I look after them for our friends. I think we should open them, don’t you?” Henrik does. He says, “I’ll go with you.”

  While Per and Henrik are turning the summer houses into hideouts, in Stockholm, Niels Bohr is with the king.

  King Gustav is glad to meet with Dr. Bohr. He is sympathetic with Bohr’s position. Absolutely.

  Will his country, then, take in Denmark’s Jews? House them, employ them, feed them, school them for the duration? Which might be forever, of course, if Germany wins the war? It is the king’s turn to be angry. Well, heavens. King Gustav will let him know.

  “London?” ask the handlers afterward, without much hope.

  Friday evening, October 1, 1943. Copenhagen.

  Hilde Hansen has had her supper. She is listening to Rossini on the record player and drinking a small glass of beer before bed.

  It is about eleven o’clock. She hears something in the hall. Footsteps. Then knocking. It’s not at her door, though. It’s a loud thumping across the hall.

  Hilde sips her beer and enjoys her music.

  Across the hall, the knocking has turned to pounding. Hilde gets up reluctantly and goes to her record player, where she lifts the needle from the groove with great care, and sets it gently on its bracket while the turntable spins out silence. If she’s going to open the door to these hounds, she doesn’t want Rossini to sweep out and get mixed up with them.

  In the hall, two men in Gestapo uniform are standing angrily, staring at the door they’ve been hammering. When her door opens, they wheel on Hilde. One has a machine gun.

  Hilde stands at the door of her now silent apartment. “What is this noise about?” she asks.

  “We are looking for Miss Tofa Bing,” says the shorter of the men.

  “She’s not at home,” says Hilde.

  “We can break the door down,” says the taller one. Both men speak in German.

  Hilde shrugs. “What good would that do?”

  “Where has she gone?”

  “Away.”

  The shorter one swears. They have a list. There are seven thousand Jews in Denmark, give or take. They have been at this for two hours. They have not found one Jew at home.

  They look angrily at Hilde who suddenly gives them a pleasant smile. It is like a slap, and they would like to slap her back. Hilde turns and closes her door. There is silence in the hall; then she hears the footsteps clumping furiously toward the stairs, heading up to the next floor. Crossing her room, Hilde pauses to say a word of comfort to Miss Bing’s cat. She goes to her turntable. She lifts the arm and blows imaginary lint from the needle, then lowers it gently back onto the record of her beloved Petite Messe Solennelle.

  Friday evening passes quietly in the house in Hornbæk. Mrs. Roth has managed to bake a challah, which seems like a proof of God’s grace, and the household shares a Sabbath supper by candlelight. The Roth children are tired out, as they spent the afternoon on the beach running and playing, wearing the Bennike family’s summer clothes. Per gave them all new names and taught them to cry “I am Per Bennike’s cousin from Alborg here for a visit!” They hear no news of what is passing in the south. The phones are dead.

  Stockholm doesn’t know the details of what is happening across the water, because the Copenhagen telephone exchange has been shut down, to prevent the quarry from summoning help, or devising escape. But there are illegal radios, a few, sending the news, and there have been terrible things to see and hear. An eighty-four-year-old woman, deaf and blind, who refused to hide because even the Nazis couldn’t be so silly as to think she threatened their racial purity, has been dragged from her home and down to the harbor. Children have been slapped, threatened, and carried from home, screaming in fear. Families have been separated, a Jewish father hauled to the harbor while his Christian wife
and children beg and weep. People have been shot trying to flee or hide, people have been frightened literally to death by the pounding on the door in the middle of the night. There have been heart attacks, and there have been suicides by people who would rather die at home than let the Germans torture and kill them in camps.

  In Stockholm, Bohr survives the night. And blessedly, Saturday morning brings him the king’s answer. Sweden will take Denmark’s Jews. A very great thing has been accomplished and everyone on this side of the sound is showing well. Bohr can leave for safety.

  But he won’t. It is now the second day of the pogrom. Those Danish Jews who are not already onboard the Wartheland and the Donau, or dead, are in hiding, out of reach. What good does it do to open the door, if the people forced against the wall don’t know it has opened? Bohr demands that this offer of refuge be made on the front page of the newspapers. He wants to hear it broadcast on Sverige Radio.

  Saturday morning, Hornbæk learns what the night has wrought. Per goes into Helsingør early and comes back shaken. The grapevine carries terrible news, and Mrs. Saloman puts her hands to her mouth as she listens, then starts to cry.

  “Samuel,” Per says to Mr. Roth, “you have to shave that beard.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I’m sorry, you must,” says Per. “You might as well go out wearing a yarmulke.”

  “It is not permitted. I’ll stay inside.”

  “You’ll shave the beard. I’ll lend you a razor.”

  “No, I’ll have to go back to Copenhagen to get one.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  Mr. Roth explains that it is forbidden to shave the beard, though it can be cut. He knows an Orthodox man who has an electric razor.

  “And that cuts?”

  “Yes,” says Roth, stubbornly.

  Per stands staring. Finally he says, “Stay here. Promise me. Don’t leave this house. None of you,” and goes off.

  What would they do if he never came back? Or if he is growing tired of this circus and turns them in?

  Per is gone for several hours. He has been to Helsingør to try to buy an electric razor, without hope and without luck. Finally the pastor in Gilleleje has turned one up, and told him several other useful things in the bargain.

  While Mr. Roth is dealing with his beard, Per tells Henrik and Ditte, “A friend of ours in Frederiksvaerk has a boatyard—he’s got a German patrol boat in the shop. He was told they won’t need it until Tuesday—there’s nothing wrong with it. He could use it to take you across to Sweden after dark.” Clearly this scheme amuses him.

  Ditte and Tofa look at each other. To them it sounds too clever. It could be a trap by the Germans, and if it isn’t, what if when they get there they are simply arrested? They have no exit permits. Can Per get them exit visas? Maybe just the forms for them to fill out? If he can, will it help? It is sickening trying to make decisions without enough information, decisions that can kill you if you get them wrong.

  Per shrugs. It would have been fun, when this is over, to tell people about the patrol boat. He goes off again. Have they tried his patience too far this time?

  Mr. Roth comes downstairs clean-shaven and his wife gives a scream. She has never seen him like this; she isn’t sure she recognizes him. The newly exposed skin is a ghastly white with very many red spots, outraged at what it’s just been through. His upper lip is longer than she thought it was, his chin a little weaker. His children come to the door to look at him and then run away and are heard giggling in the next room. Mr. Roth sits down heavily and won’t talk to anyone.

  There are people in all the houses on the lane now, crouching behind curtains. Per and others, the pastor, three schoolteachers, and the veterinarian, are engaged in buying and making food and trying to get exit permit forms, in case. Inside the Bennike house, however, they know nothing of the others, and feel alone. They have not been outside for twenty-four hours. They have seen German soldiers patrolling the roads and beaches. At one point in the afternoon a knocking at the kitchen door frightens them rigid. In minutes everyone is out of sight except Henrik, the children in closets, the adults in the basement, which is unpleasantly dank.

  Henrik looks out the window before opening the door. There is a young woman waiting; her bicycle leans against a tree.

  “Is Per at home?” she asks.

  “No, he is not, at the moment. I am his uncle Henrik from Aalborg.”

  “I’m glad to meet you. Will you tell Per, please, that Anka was here? Tell him I think I found the rucksack he was looking for. It’s quite a big one, with eight apples in it.”

  “I’d be glad to—would you like to write him a note?”

  “No, no. No. But please remember the message exactly. I need to know when he can pick it up.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  It was many hours before Per came back. The children have been fed a cold supper and sent to bed; one of the Roth children has a fever, and everyone is on edge. They are in Per’s bedroom, gathered around his radio for the BBC broadcast when the announcement is made: Sweden has offered refuge to the Jews of Denmark. It is all they can do to keep from shouting. Mrs. Saloman begins to cry again and the Roths to pray aloud their gratitude.

  Per comes back exhausted. He knows, though he does not tell them, that there are now Jews hidden in haylofts, attics, boathouses, and basements all along the coast. Best is furious. The Gestapo is furious. Per has his shoes off, a cheese sandwich in one hand and a beer in the other, when Henrik remembers Anka’s message from the afternoon.

  “Brava!” shouts Per. He wolfs the rest of his supper and struggles back into his shoes. “She’s found a boat! The fisherman wants eight hundred kroner apiece…how much money do you have?”

  The Mosses and Tofa have enough. The Roths do not. But Mr. Saloman will pay for them. Per is off again. The children are awakened and dressed. Then everybody waits.

  When Per comes back, cold and wet and almost too tired to speak, it is to tell them that the boat has already gone. There will be no more crossings tonight. They are glad finally to go to bed, but very frightened at what the morning will bring. Now that the Germans know every Jew left in Denmark will be trying to cross the sound, they will make an impenetrable net waiting to catch them. Won’t they?

  Sunday morning, October 3. A letter from the Lutheran bishops of Denmark is read from virtually every pulpit in the country. It denounces the action against the Jews, and declares that whoever protects them follows the laws of God, not of man.

  The Germans, embarrassed and angry, are circling and baying throughout the country like a pack of hounds that have treed a fox but can’t shake it down. There are thousands of cornered Jews under their noses. But where?

  Adolf Eichmann, with his ice-cold eyes, arrives in Copenhagen.

  An offer is made to General Goetz of the Danish Army and Admiral Vedel of the navy. The Germans know that most Danes long to be Judenrein, Jew-free, like Aryans everywhere; they offer to exchange the Danish soldiers and sailors they interned when the government fell, for Jews. The reply comes: “There is no point in exchanging one Dane for another Dane.”

  The Wartheland leaves Copenhagen with not thousands of captives, but 202. The Donau leaves empty.

  Sunday morning the promise Niels Bohr extracted is in the Swedish papers, and has been announced through official channels. The hand has been forced, by Bohr and by the Swedish people themselves, who are already giving shelter to the trickle of refugees who have made it across the sound since Wednesday. Some have come in the night by small boat or kayak. Some have been rowed the two-plus miles from Helsingør or Snekkersten to Helsingborg, where the distance is narrowest, by Danes young and old whose palms are skinless and bloody by the time they get home.

  Sydney stayed in Cleveland for two weeks. It was the longest time she’d ever passed under her mother’s roof without hostilities. Bernard was home again and recovering, slowly. He spent most of his time sitting in the library with a plaid rug across his
knees. The unexpected event of the visit was that Bernard had fallen in love with Eleanor. She was a calm, bright, sunny child. Sydney could put the baby down on her blanket with a few rattles and Bernard would watch her for hours as she gurgled and chewed on things. She liked to crawl over to his chair and pull herself up to a standing position, holding on to his finger, and it was in that little room with Bernard that she took her first steps entirely on her own. You’d have thought Bernard and Eleanor had invented the whole proposition of upright ambulation themselves, he was so excited.

  “The most enchanting child,” he would cry to visitors. Naturally, Sydney was softening toward him. Meanwhile she was free to accompany her mother on her rounds, while Bernard and Maudie managed the baby. It was rather pleasant.

  One day far in the future, Eleanor herself, with her daughters, would read Candace’s Line-a-Day journal for the weekend of Denmark’s dark struggle.

  This is what they found:

  Thursday, Sept. 30, 1943. Went to Dr. Stephan’s at 11. Several dental casualties this summer. Went to opening meeting of Women’s Com. of the Orchestra with Mabel—Mrs. Clark presided charmingly. Mr. Leinsdorf spoke—(the new 32-yr-old conductor)—hope he conducts better than he speaks. Lunch and bridge after.

  Fri., October 1. To market. It is slow work these days—Had my hair done at 12:30. Mabel here for dinner and a short eve—very pleasant. Naples has fallen to the Allies. The Germans have destroyed all harbor facilities but it is a great victory.

  St., Oct. 2. To market and bot a pound of butter!—12 pts now, but will be 16 Mon.—a wk’s ration. Eleanor cried a great deal at dinner. To Dr. Stephan’s in AM—toothache.

  Sun., Oct. 3. World Wide Communion at many churches. Walked to church—40 joined today. Had a roast of beef fordinner—Maudie and Velma gave me all their pts which ex pired yest.