A Child's Tapestry of War
- Book Review,
by Anne Ipsen
Book Description
Anne Ipsen's memoir of her Danish childhood is bathed in the light of long summer evenings and the love of doting parents. But the evocative, artful strands that weave this story are interlaced with the menace and cruelty of the Nazi occupation of Denmark during World War II. This chronicle of a childhood in Denmark spins homey images: a mother who implores Anne to pick flowers with long stems, but gives her a little egg cup for the tiny bouquet she presents; Far, her father the doctor, boosting her up the hills on a nine-mile bicycle trek to their weekend retreat; the two best friends whose rag dolls "canoe inside the radiators between apartments" after the girls are asleep. But for Anne, the ages from five to ten are overlaid with another kind of impression as German troops settle into an increasingly resisted occupation of Denmark during the Second World War: My memories are vivid images like those of a medieval tapestry, woven from the fine threads of everyday life. They are filled with the colorful mille fleurs from a happy childhood and a white unicorn of fantasy encircled by family, but with an ominous backdrop of hunters in green-German soldiers. This weaving of images creates a childhood in which normalcy is cherished and nurtured, but cannot be ensured. Before the war, Anne's mother-Mor-spies a red kerosene lamp in a store, brings it home and declares, "I want a house to go with this lamp." The resulting cabin provides a respite from city life complete with books read aloud by the fireplace, a strawberry patch and forget-me-nots by a hidden stream. But even this idyllic sanctuary can't shut out the war: Mor took a little notebook and a pencil and went outside. She knew how to handle these intruders, taking advantage of their respect for authority. "Get off my land," she said in German. "This is private property. I want your name, rank and the name of your commanding officer in order to lodge a complaint." The Germans leave the Ipsen's land. But they didn't leave everyone alone. Cousin Clara, in her eighties and half-Jewish, is sent to a concentration camp, and put in charge of a gasoline pump. Yet she survives the war, with most of the other five hundred Danish Jews arrested by the Nazis. About seven thousand Jews-with the help of the Danish Underground-escaped from Denmark to Sweden. The images created in a country under siege bear testament to the ingenuity of Danish resistance: King Christian X, followed by all Danes, displaying a yellow star on his coat in solidarity with the Jews so marked by the Germans; Anne's piano teacher and her husband who keep records of collaborators for the Underground and move their family nightly; a general strike that paralyzes the country until the Nazis cancel the early curfew they had imposed. Within a life already rich in characters and traditions, Anne's childhood expands to glimpse a world rocked by the savagery of war, whether a school accidentally destroyed by bombs or her father's personal account of a humanitarian mission to assist concentration camp survivors-"Five hundred years ago Hieronymus Bosch described horror scenes of genderless human bodies on the way to hell. There in Padborg stood such a line. . . ." Europe is in shambles. Denmark is occupied by the German army. Yet life goes on, in a book of childhood discovery, exquisite images, and extraordinary and ordinary occurrences: Someone turned on the radio because Churchill was to speak. Everyone rushed into the living room to hear him, leaving Oldemor [Anne's eighty-eight-year old great-grandmother] sitting alone at the table. Over Churchill's dramatic voice, finally announcing the German surrender, Oldemor was heard to complain, "Why are you all leaving? Don't you want a piece of my birthday cake?"
From the Author
[From the Epilogue] When friends hear my stories they express surprise that I can really remember all these events. At first I too was surprised, not that I can remember my childhood in such detail, but that not everyone else can. My father had almost total recall, not only of what he had experienced, but what he had read and seen and heard. He had an inexhaustible supply of family stories and could quote long poems from memory. His dry wit often contained allusions to literature or to shared events. He laughed with delight when a listener replied in a similar vein. Mother too would regale us with long tales, and when my children were small, entranced them with stories of "when Mommy was a little girl." If she had gone to an afternoon movie, we would hear the whole story in living color that evening. The telling sometimes took longer than the viewing. I seem to have inherited some of these talents, by nature or by nurture. Those events that I didn't experience directly or didn't clearly remember were told and retold by my parents so that now I cannot distinguish the events themselves from their refreshed memories. It is therefore not strange to me that the war years are still vivid. The smallest incidence can trigger recall; a glimpse becomes a bridge to memory. There are a thousand bridges. I am flying home at night after a business meeting in Washington and see the lights of Minneapolis twinkling below. I wonder how this city would look from the air with blackout shades at the windows, and street lights and car headlights dimmed. I wake in the early Minnesota winter morning. A fire engine goes by sounding its urgent siren. What an ominous haunting sound. I am only half-awake and sleepily wonder if it is an air raid. Am I supposed to go to the basement? A few stars twinkle at the window through the haze of urban lights. My nose is cold but I am warm under my quilt. The war was like that. As long as we stayed in the warmth of family, we were safe and could ignore the cold outside. The stars of freedom twinkled their reassurance from above. My mother and I were once discussing my peripatetic adolescence after the war when we sailed back and forth across the Atlantic, lived in several eastern cities in the United States, and I struggled with the alienation of being both a teen-ager and an immigrant. "Well, at least you had those five stable years when we lived By The Rampart," said Mor. We smiled at our memories, and the haze of nostalgia completely obscured the fact that those 'good old days' were in the midst of the terror of a world war.
About the Author
Anne Ipsen was born in Denmark where she lived during the Second World War and the German occupation. After the war, she and her parents traveled in the United States and finally settled in Boston, where she graduated from Radcliffe and eventually received her doctorate from Harvard University. In 1970 Anne, her husband, and their three children moved to Minneapolis. She is now a professor at the University of Minnesota and the author of numerous papers in professional journals. This memoir is her first literary publication.
Excerpted from A Child's Tapestry of War by Anne Ipsen. Copyright © 1998. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
[From Chapter 1: Markelakningsrullegardiner. The beginning of my consistent childhood memories coincides with the German occupation of Denmark during the Second World War. It was the morning of April 9, 1940, four days before my birthday. My parents and I were standing by the living room window of our apartment in Copenhagen, looking up at the German planes flying overhead. "They must be going to Norway," Mor said. Like all Danish children, I called my parents Mor and Far, short for the formal Moder and Fader. Mor knew that our Norwegian neighbors to the north were fighting the Germans in air and sea battles. However, 'war' and even 'Norway' meant nothing to me; after all, I was not yet five. "I'll go get a newspaper and find out what's going on," said Far, buckling the leather belt around his waist and across the front of his army uniform. He was a doctor, completing his compulsory military service in the reserves of the Medical Corps. The leather belt was a relic from a more innocent time when army officers carried swords. Soon he returned, bounding up the stairs to our third floor apartment, as usual taking the steps two at a time instead of waiting for the lumbering elevator. "And then the newsboy said, 'Hey Pops, you better get out of that uniform-we've been invaded!' " Far told us breathlessly. "I suppose I should report to the Army Hospital for orders," he said doubtfully. "But maybe I should take off my uniform first," he added with an ironic smile, unbuckling his belt. What is a soldier supposed to do when his country has been invaded and nobody told him? By the end of the day, he was dismissed from further service and could concentrate on his regular job at the State Serum Institute where he worked in the department responsible to the League of Nations for the standardization of vaccines. The army uniform was hung in the back of the closet. My parents always played honeymoon bridge after dinner and talked about the events of the day. Usually they talked about boring everyday events with Far relating the happenings of his day and Mor prompting, "And what did you say then?" Now it became more exciting, though most of the details and politics went over my head. I stayed to listen hoping that Mor wouldn't chase me off to my room to play. Both of my parents were marvelous storytellers and tried to explain the mysteries of this new world to me. Mor excelled at relating her everyday adventures and describing the people she met, past and present. Far knew everything from literature and history to science and music. He could make anything interesting with his dry sense of humor and ready smile. "That morning the king saw his wonderful guards slaughtered and stopped the fighting. You know, they pick the best soldiers to guard the palace and only the ones who are tall enough. They have to be as tall as the king," Far said, shuffling the cards. I imagined the tall king standing on the balcony of the palace and looking down at his guards in their tall fuzzy hats lying wounded on the parade ground. Christian X had always been a symbol of rectitude and dignity, riding through the city on his horse every morning, so punctual that people bragged they could set their watches by his passing. He now became a focal point of national pride and the hero of wondrous tales of stubborn passive resistance. Every morning he continued to ride, alone and unguarded as always, maintaining an appearance of normalcy. Mor showed me his picture in the paper-a tall soldier on a horse, sporting a dapper mustache and smiling paternally down at his people. His uniform looked just like the one Far never wore again, but hid in the back of the coat closet, just in case. "They're still fighting at the border, down near Snderborg where your grandfather lives. Everybody expected they would invade there, as Bismarck did in 1864," Far explained. "Hitler says he is protecting us from the British! How can he expect us to believe that?" Mor complained. The king and the government went along with this useful fiction which allowed life to remain nearly normal and the government to remain in power-for a while. A few days after that memorable morning, I looked down at the long rolls of black paper lying on the hall floor. "What's that?" "Markelagningsrullegardiner." "Huh?" "Marke-aknings-rulle-gardiner." I tried to say the strange difficult word for blackout curtains, as long as the black rolls of paper waiting on the floor to be installed. The word parts are glued together and literally mean 'darkness-laying-roller-shades.' "The Germans are making us cover the windows at night so the English war planes can't use the city lights to find their way," Mor explained. I couldn't believe they really worked. Light leaked out at the sides and I could see the outline of our windows when we were outside after dark. Wouldn't the pilots see us just as well from the air? And why would the English want to bomb us when we were on their side? Oh, how we hated those curtains; they became a metaphor for those five years: laying a darkness on life and the land. Closing them at dusk became an evening ritual, a reminder of what was out there but always opened at bedtime so we could see the twinkling stars shining from a free world beyond war.
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