Heroes live among us
Published: November 5, 2005
When I was a child I could always trump the stories other kids told about their dads. While they bragged about sports feats or interesting jobs, I would wait for my chance and then say: “My dad went to jail.”
It always stopped them cold.
And I had no shame about it because my father, Anker Gram, was incarcerated for actively resisting the German occupation of Denmark during the Second World War.
Dad didn’t talk about his war experiences much when we were growing up, except to joke that he learned to play bridge in jail. We knew he had been in the underground and that he’d been caught when the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, came looking for his comrade and found him instead. We knew he was shipped off to a concentration camp near the end of the war and he was one of the lucky ones who survived.
Maybe that was enough as a child. But last June when he turned 79, he and I flew back to his homeland. He wanted to see all his siblings. I did too, but as we flew over Greenland I made him promise to tell me everything he could remember about that time. What I heard was a story right out of the movies. A story of bravery, coded signals, assumed names and betrayal.
Dad was 13 years old in April, 1940, when the Germans invaded Denmark. They took the Danes completely by surprise. Danish cannons were so old and poorly maintained that they failed when fired; the Danish military was too small to put up much of a defence, and the Germans had control of the country by nightfall.
The Danish parliament decided the best course of action would be passive cooperation, arguing the Danes would just get slaughtered if they, like the Dutch or Norwegians, actively opposed the occupation.
In the end, that proved true. Danes suffered much less than the Norwegians or the Dutch. But the policy was hugely controversial and still is today. Most Danes hated Adolf Hitler and his policies. And many, especially those in the south of Jutland where my father grew up, also objected to the occupation with intense nationalistic fervour.
Resistance began almost immediately
Still others, mostly Communists, opposed on political grounds, arguing that Danish acquiescence helped the German cause and prolonged the war. But there were Danes who saw the occupation as a golden opportunity to make a quick buck selling the Germans whatever they needed. And there were some who embraced the Nazi philosophy and collaborated with the occupiers.
As a young man raging with testosterone, my father was both idealistic and a nationalist. The son of a farmer who was also a member of the opposition in parliament, Dad had been brought up to love Denmark and hate the Germans for past wrongs. But he also vehemently objected to Hitler’s ethnic and political cleansing.
Underground resistance began almost immediately after the invasion and gradually became more effective. At first it worked to counter the German propaganda machine, putting out its own news gleaned from the BBC. It also used humour to make the occupiers look foolish.
But as the war progressed, the German presence became more oppressive, targeting Jews, dismantling the police and military and viciously reacting to even the mildest forms of resistance. Simultaneously, the underground became more active and coordinated, conducting almost daily bombings of the railways to prevent shipments to and from Norway and assisting in hiding and transporting Jewish Danes to Sweden.
For two years, my father observed the occupation from his school classroom, reading the underground newsletter and never getting used to the soldiers on the street corners, in the bakeries and in the theatres.
But at 17, a friend about four years his senior, dropped a pistol on his classroom desk and asked him if he wanted to join the resistance.
Dad didn’t hesitate. He joined a sabotage cell, excited to be in on the action. But when their leader fled to Sweden shortly thereafter to avoid arrest, Dad had to put his zeal on the back burner.
In the meantime, he also joined a cell that printed and distributed accurate news about the war. Twice a week members of the cell printed thousands of four-page newsletters on a hand-cranked Gestetner. It would take hours just to print them. Then they’d stuff them into envelopes, stamp and address them and, in the middle of the night, they’d hop on their bicycles for a dangerous ride through town, dumping them into mailboxes.
“We went down the street with two heavy suitcases and there were German soldiers all over the place,” he recalled. “Getting caught would not have been good.”
One of his teachers was in that cell. So was a man named Ove Neilsen, who later accompanied Dad on many missions including one to find other cells that, like Dad’s sabotage cell, had fallen off the radar due to the arrest or disappearance of their link to the resistance leadership. It was a necessary job, but it put my father and Neilsen in a vulnerable position because they came to know the names of many more resistance fighters than most. Dad often wondered if Neilsen was strong enough to handle that risk.
The cell was also called upon to print posters calling for a general strike in July 1944, in response to a curfew imposed by the Germans.
Dad remembers walking through town after curfew with a big glue pot and a stack of posters. Listening closely for the heavy footfall of the German soldiers, he’d glue the posters to telephone poles and walls. The strike was a huge success. Everyone walked off the job, and after a few days days, the Germans agreed to end the curfew and remove the hated Danish Nazi patrols from the streets.
Dad’s cell was told to poster the town again calling for an end to the strike.
“The next day we saw a whole group of people standing around a poster trying to decipher if it was written by the Germans or by the resistance,” Dad recalls.
After much discussion, the people ripped the poster down and held it up against the light. There, shining through the light, was a swastika water mark, proving to them that the poster was a German trick to get them back to work.
How could they know that Dad’s cell had stolen the paper used for the poster from the German barracks? Unable to say so, Dad and his gang just had to reprint the poster on clean paper and re-poster the town that night.
During this period, Dad’s saboteur cell had pulled off a few small jobs, stealing weapons or putting sugar in German gas tanks. Then, in the fall of 1944, it got back in the game when it received weapons and dynamite from London. They were assigned to blow up a machine shop nearby, which the Germans were using to make parts for their U-boats. This was to be their first bombing and they practised making them in their bedrooms. For weeks they waited, listening to the BBC short-wave radio for the signal to proceed. Their signal would say “Greetings from Langelinie,” the name of a quay in Copenhagen.
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