What We Are Made of

My parents told us plenty of stories about growing up under the war in Denmark and from adult perspective I certainly feel grateful that we have grown up in Canada where we have been safe from the threat of invasion and war.

            When my father was ten years old he heard the planes flying over Denmark and went home to his parents and said “the Germans are coming”.  (Germany invaded Denmark on April 9, 1940)  His parents didn’t believe him at first but soon enough the country became aware that they were invaded.  The Germans occupied the schools as living quarters so the children did not attend school with any kind of regularity.  Soon enough there was rationing of food, gasoline, leather goods and other things.  My father described how they made shoe soles out of old bicycle tires.  They had liquorice made of liquorice bark or root.  Under this war Danes began eating unsalted butter so that after the war they had become so accustomed to this type of butter that few went back to salted butter.  We always had unsalted butter in our home.

            When my father told the story of the invasion he said “one million Germans occupied Denmark against 9 soldiers at the border”.  That was a bit of an exaggeration.  In the initial action there were approximately 120,000 Germans against 2 divisions of Danish.  The country did not accept the occupation quietly although initial resistance began slowly.  By 1943 there was a large wave of underground resistance and in 1944 there was an actual uprising in Copenhagen.  The Germans had been fairly reasonable with the Danes during the occupation compared with their attitude in other countries but the Danes were quietly furious when the rumour went out that there would be a roundup of Jews.  Under cover of night all but 472 of the 8,000 Jews are spirited across to Sweden or otherwise hidden by the Danes.  Of those, 70 lost their lives in the concentration camps.

            My father told us how even children were recruited to the non-violent resistance movement; they would distribute leaflets and they put sand in gasoline tanks.  At the same time, he described how the Germans could strike fear into people as they stormed up the stairs of apartment buildings in the dead of night.  One never knew when the door would bang open and Gestapo would be in your home.  He described standing in the street and seeing neighbours shot at because more than 2 had congregated on the street after the ban.  He saw his own mother dive into a building to avoid being shot while he dived into another building across the street.

            My family lived in Aalborg close to where the airstrip was and so there would be bombs dropped by the British to try to blockade the German air force.  London wasn’t the only allied city that was being bombed regularly.

            These were some of the stories I grew up on.  War is not something to be taken lightly.  And heroism isn’t the glory that we see in a John Wayne movie.  Heroism is enduring the ignominy of an occupation with quiet, stoic resistance until the tree is bent beyond endurance.