Wildflowers of Terezin

by Robert Elmer

  Instead she would put on another record, perhaps, and if she still had enough kerosene she might even heat up a can of ham she'd been saving for a special occasion. Talk about guilty pleasures for this lapsed Jewish girl! A warm sponge bath might be nice, as well.

  She would explain to Aron that she'd had to work late, and he would have to accept it. There. Was there anything else to decide?

  Out in the hallway, she heard the phone ringing once more, and again. Only this time, no one was answering.

  "Come on," she whispered through the door, "someone pick up the phone, out there."

  Still it rang, until Hanne finally had to unbolt her door and peek out to make sure no one else had heard. Surely? But whoever was calling this time wasn't giving up.

  Against her better judgment she tiptoed out onto the cold wood floor in her stockings, past the silent doors of three other nurses, and hovered above the single black phone on its spindly little stand at the end of the hallway. For a moment she wondered if it could be Aron again. She could always pretend it was a faulty connection and hang up.

  "Hello?" She finally answered. And speaking of Dr.Kielsgaard—

  "Hanne! I'm glad I reached you. Where is everyone?"

  "I, ah. . . ."

  She would truthfully have told the attending emergency room physician that she had no idea what happened to the other girls on a Friday evening, but he didn't give her a chance.

  "Never mind. I need you back in here right away. Several more . . . incidents."

  Hanne caught her breath but knew better than to question the doctor. Incidents would mean more young men from the Resistance had just been brought in, perhaps with gunshot wounds or worse. She simply bit her lip and nodded.

  "I'll be right there."

  She was about to hang up the phone, but he had one more request.

  "And see if there's anyone else on the hall who can come with you."

  "Right away."

  This time Hanne set down the receiver and hurried down the hall, knocking on doors. Was she a good Jew? Maybe and maybe not, depending. She would save the canned ham for another time. But if she was a good nurse—well, that question seemed much easier to answer.

  7

  BISPEBJERG HOSPITAL EMERGENCY ROOM

  SATURDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER 1943

  One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons.

  —DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

  Time of death, five minutes to half-eight." Dr. Kielsgaard stripped off his rubber gloves and flung them in the general direction of a trash bin. Naturally, Hanne didn't want to stare, so she pretended not to notice as she turned away and did her best to fill in the details on her clipboard.

  Seven twenty-five in the morning. She squeezed her eyes together to focus. Name, Nikolai Nielsen, if the identity card they'd found in his ripped trousers could be believed. Age, sixteen, with flaming red hair. Still a boy. Cause of death—

  She didn't have to ask the doctor, who now leaned up against the corner of the exam room in sheer exhaustion.Gunshot wound to the side, she noted in her best handwriting.On the form she found no space to indicate that the bullet came from a German gun, fired by a German soldier, under German occupation. No space to explain the total stupidity and waste of what had just happened. Finally, Dr.Kielsgaard took a deep breath and cleared his throat, as if steeling himself for what surely came next.

  "We did all we could," whispered Hanne, as if that would make any difference. Of course they had. But the doctor just shook his head.

  "Just like we did yesterday, Hanne, and the day before. And where does that leave us?" He brushed by her on the way to the door. "Are his parents still out in the waiting room?"

  She nodded, knowing he wasn't waiting for her answer."They've been there since his friends brought him in last night."

  So the parents had obviously defied curfew, and they'd prayed, and they'd paced the waiting room for the past six hours. But all the prayers in the world hadn't brought their son back to life. And now Dr. Kielsgaard had to bring them the news they did not want to hear. He frowned with his hand against the swinging door, obviously composing himself.

  Hanne would much rather run in the opposite direction, away from the body that now lay cooling on the operating table, and away from his two friends, all seriously wounded in some kind of midnight sabotage attempt gone wrong. Yes, and neither of them had fared much better than Nikolai Nielsen—except for the fact that they still breathed. Barely.

  Perhaps she should have run, while she still had the chance. That, or collapse on the floor in exhaustion from the extra shift she had just survived. Instead her eyes focused on the doctor and she mindlessly followed him into the waiting room, where he faced the unenviable task of telling the parents their son had died.

  Actually, Dr. Kielsgaard needn't have worried about eloquence or words to say, if that's what concerned him. His dark expression must have told them all they needed to know, even before he opened his mouth. And just moments after he entered the small room with the uncomfortable wood chairs lined up against the wall, a couple in the corner looked up at him with a mixture of disbelief and horror splashed across their tired faces. Without a word the woman buried her face in her husband's shoulder and sobbed, while his eyes widened in pain and he pressed his quivering lips together.

  "We told him not to get involved," said the father, arching his head back and talking to the ceiling. "He wouldn't listen."

  "We did everything we could," replied Dr. Kielsgaard, echoing Hanne's helpless words as he stood awkwardly in the middle of the small room, his face mask dangling by a string around his neck. "And I'm terribly sorry, you understand. But by the time he was brought in, he'd already lost too much blood. We could not save him. There was nothing more to be done."

  Hanne knew the truth of his words all too well, though that surely must not have made it any easier for the parents to hear. Fortunately, the only other person in the room, a large woman stuffed into one of the waiting chairs, slept with her head back and her mouth wide open. She punctuated the sound of this couple's mourning with her snores.

  Strange, though, how resigned this couple seemed to be, despite their obvious grief. They didn't shout "Nej!" or accuse the doctor of being somehow mistaken. Now they just stood in the corner, holding each other up. Perhaps they had already known what would happen when they brought their son in.

  And now Hanne genuinely wished she had not followed the doctor here to see this horrible, heavy sadness that filled the room, though it was not the first time and would most certainly not be the last.

  "He was only sixteen," sobbed the mother. "He was going to take his exams this year. He was such a good boy."

  Now the mother looked up and her tortured gaze locked on Hanne. And for the longest moment neither could pull away, as the full weight of pain nearly brought Hanne to her knees.

  "If you'll follow me, please." Now the doctor had regained a measure of his professional composure, as Hanne would have expected. "We'll have some paperwork for you to fill out."

  The father nodded numbly, as if giving in to the maelstrom from which none of them could escape. The mother had returned to her helpless sobbing but still held to her husband.And so the bereaved parents followed Dr. Kielsgaard past Hanne without another word, for they had also died and this paperwork was their unavoidable duty as members of the otherworld.

  I should never have answered the phone last night, thought Hanne, her tired mind retreating into its protective bunker of "what if." I should have shut the door, locked it, and not opened for anyone. Not for Dr. Kielsgaard. Not for Aron. Not for the Nazis. I should have hidden myself in the closet.

  If she could just lock the door and keep it locked until this was all over, she reasoned, perhaps she could better survive the nightmare that had darkened København streets for the past several months. And in her twisted state of fatigue, such a silly proposition almost seemed to make sense. Hide. She glanced up at the clock once more, trying to remember if seve
n thirty-five was morning or evening. She still clutched her clipboard with the notes of how this brave young man's life had ended, and when.

  Time of death, seven twenty-five. Cause of death, murder.

  She set the clipboard on the nearest counter, dropped the pencil, and walked away.

  Steffen leaned back in his comfortable leather chair and tidied his sermon notes again on his wide oak office desk, next to his open Bible. Still the words stuck in his throat as he rehearsed them from his notes.

  "Were there not ten that were healed?" he read aloud, raising a hand to the bandage on his side, still good and sore but now well-hidden beneath his cleaned and pressed shirt. The scars on his chin and on the back of his hand, hopefully no one would notice. "Where are the other nine?"

  He'd given the same sermon two years ago, according to the every-other-year church reading calendar and with the calm precision and orderliness that defined his world.

  For the most part.

  Perhaps he just needed a little more rest, especially after all the excitement with the bicycle incident and his short stay at Bispebjerg Hospital. So he rested his chin in his hands, listening to the quiet ticking of the gold mantle clock on the corner of his desk, and tried to shake the persistent image of that nurse, Hanne.

  She was just doing her job, he told himself. I'm sure she's equally as pleasant to all her patients. That's what she's called on to do, just as I'm called on to deliver this sermon.

  Yes, if he could. He caught himself smiling and still unable to forget her face, her voice, or the touch of her hand as she took his pulse.

  "Your heart rate seems a little high, again," she had told him. If only she'd known why. He actually tried to forget about the dark-eyed nurse as he stared out his office window at the elms that lined Stefansgade. A motorcycle roared past with a German soldier in a sidecar. Why were they always so loud, and always in such a hurry? This time Steffen granted himself a private frown for the way the war had strained and pushed at the borders of his ministry. But they had not broken through, he added with a touch of pride. Services commenced promptly at ten o'clock every Sunday morning, even as they had before the war began. The work continued.So too did burials and baptisms, weddings and confirmations.He'd confirmed eleven young people in the last confirmation class, only last month. Everything continued as it always had.

  What's more, Steffen was certain that if they—that is, the people of his parish—would simply continue to exercise restraint and caution, this storm would blow over and the invaders would return home, just as the motorcycle had turned the corner of and disappeared down Nørrebrogade.Hadn't King Christian himself ordered them not to resist, but to keep calm and cooperate? This he could do, and he could advise his congregation to do the same.

  If only his own brother would follow that advice.

  Because the . . . unpleasantness could hardly last forever, and resistance—particularly the violent sort Henning advocated—could only make things worse, in his humble opinion.

  For a moment he thought he could smell the motorcycle's exhaust, drifting up from the street below, until he realized it was a smoke of another sort—an amber cigar smoke, pungent and nose-tickling. This early? Now at least he had an excuse to step away from his desk, notes in hand, and to stretch his own legs.

  Moments later he made his way out of the back door to join Pastor Viggo Jensen. Lost in thought and a cloud of home-rolled cigar smoke, the retired pastor looked up with a start from his spot by the garbage cans, almost as if Steffen had just caught a schoolboy sneaking a forbidden cigarette.

  "Ah, Steffen! Didn't expect to see you here so early." Pastor Viggo peered out through his smoke screen and from under a pair of gray eyebrows made even more impressive by the near-lack of hair on the man's head. And like a matching bookend, his well-polished shoes reflected a smile as he glanced at the papers in Steffen's hand. "Working on your sermon? The story of the ten lepers?"

  None other.

  "Actually, yes. I was thinking how they received their healing after obedience. One of my commentaries has a bit about that. In the Greek, hupakouo, 'I obey.' "

  The other man smiled. "I actually do know a few words of Greek."

  "Of course you do. But the point is, perhaps that's our situation here: If we obey King Christian's word, we may be healed as a nation. If not . . ."

  "Hmm." Now Pastor Viggo wrinkled his forehead in concentration.Steffen could hear it coming.

  "It's all a matter of obedience, don't you think?" continued Steffen, hoping to make a good enough impression to gain the elder pastor's approval this time. If he did, though, that would probably be a first.

  "Perhaps," he continued, "but then the question would be, to whom?"

  Steffen hadn't considered that way of looking at it. Pastor Viggo went on, as if he wasn't expecting an answer.

  "And don't you have any personal experiences you might relate to that passage? Some practical application? How's your health these days? Anything you can be thankful for, after that accident of yours?"

  "Oh, you don't mean after my little bicycle wreck?" Steffen shrugged away the experience. "I'm certain no one would want to hear about that."

  "Really? Why not? Your brother seemed quite interested, when he came to check on you. Speaking of which, he's, ah, quite active these days, is he not?"

  "Yes, his work at the bookstore keeps him busy."

  Pastor Viggo paused again, as if waiting for more, then nodded his head.

  "In any case," he said, "wasn't there something in this passage about how the fellow's faith made him well? You're well, are you not? I wonder if you couldn't tie in your experience that way?"

  "Actually . . ." Steffen backed away from Pastor Viggo. He should have known the elder pastor would suggest a personal angle. And the personal angles, it seemed, would always make him look . . . well, foolish. "There's very little to explain. I lost my balance. They stitched me up quite well. That's about all there is to the story."

  "Well, but I'm sure you'll think of something from one of your books, then," said Pastor Viggo. Now he seemed unflappable, as if this little exchange bothered him not the least."And I'll very much look forward to hearing it tomorrow. You always come up with something appropriate."

  Yes, appropriate, thought Steffen. Safe. Unlike his brother.He thanked Pastor Viggo, wondering if he should not have stayed in his office with his friends the commentaries—where it was quiet.

  8

  IBSEN'S BOOKSTORE, KØBENHAVN

  MONDAY, 27 SEPTEMBER 1943

  Life can only be understood backwards;

  but it must be lived forwards.

  —SØREN KIERKEGAARD

  You never told me where you got that gun, you know."Steffen didn't mean to sound like their mother when he spoke to his younger brother, Henning. It just came out that way, even when he lowered his voice to a whisper. And it wasn't hard to decipher Henning's reaction by the way he frowned as he leaned against a weighed-down shelf of dusty books.

  "Why do you ask?" Henning lowered an upside-down copy of H. C. Andersen's Collected Fairy Tales. He looked more like a soccer player than a bookstore clerk. "You want to borrow it?"

  "Borrow it? Nej. One of us getting arrested would be quite enough."

  Henning fidgeted as he glanced around the cluttered little store, piled high with used books of all kinds in floor- toceiling shelves that groaned under the weight. None of the other three customers looked up from their books, and in fact seemed to making a good show of ignoring the entire exchange.

  "Look," said Steffen. "I just thought we needed to talk about . . . you know, what happened the other day. I don't want you getting in more trouble."

  "Who said I was in trouble?" Henning pushed aside a lock of blonde hair with an irritated puff of air. He had always worn his hair too long, even when they were both in Gymnasium, before Steffen went on to the School of Theology at the University of København and Henning dropped out.

  "I'm not saying you are, Hen
ning. But listen to me. Have you already forgotten what they did to that Times editor last month . . . what was his name?"

  "Clemmensen."

  "Right. Clemmensen. And what they did to him is exactly what they do to anybody else who sticks his neck out."

  "I'm surprised you knew anything about him."

  "Clemmensen was an editor for the biggest paper in København, for goodness sake!"

  "A shame too. I hear he was a good man."

  "Was, Henning. Past tense. They killed him, don't you see?"

  "Oh, I see, all right." Henning didn't back away. "But he's not the only one, you know. A kid named Nicolai Nielsen was shot and killed last night. Two of our other people were badly hurt. And do you know how old he was?"

  Obviously Steffen had no idea, so Henning went on.

  "Sixteen. The kid was just sixteen! And the thing was, even at that age he was willing to give his life for what he believed."

  "Sixteen." Steffen shook his head in disbelief. "This is starting to get really dangerous. I think you need to be more careful."

  "Me? You're just getting out of the hospital, and you're telling me to be careful? That's a good one."

  "Yes, I'm well aware of how it sounds. The difference is, you're directly involved, and I'm not. I'm just saying that you ought to consider getting out of this while you still can."