Heroes live among us
Published: November 5, 2005
When he arrived at the Kolding city jail, Dad expected a cell much like the miserable one in Copenhagen. But the German warden of the jail sympathized with the resistance and made sure Dad was put in the “corner suite,” a cell twice as large as the others, with two windows, four beds and a table. Three other prisoners, an army captain, a police detective, and sailor already lived there. The captain and the detective had been rounded up when the Nazis dissolved the Danish military and police, incarcerating all members. In that cell, they played endless games of bridge, smoked smuggled cigarettes and ate the finest Danish sandwiches prepared by the best restaurant in town and smuggled in by an undertaker known as Little Brother.
Egeskjold, however, was served the prison food, which consisted mainly of cabbage soup and bread.
Most prisoners stayed in the jail for only a week or two before being transferred to concentration camps including Buchenwald. Egeskjold was transferred to a camp for resistance fighters on Danish soil within days of transferring to Kolding. But because Dad knew so much, the Germans kept him there for two months trying to squeeze him for information.
Periodically, prisoners would be taken by bus to the Gestapo headquarters at the local castle. Two stables had been converted into holding cells into which up to 50 prisoners would crowd, awaiting their turn to be interrogated, all the while hearing the cries of those enduring questioning. Dad was taken there at least four times.
Once, two high-ranking SS officers came for him at 4 a.m. He thought they would drive to the castle stables, although it was unusual for the SS to do that. Instead, the officers loaded Dad into a car and headed north. After some time listening to the officers chatting in the front seat, Dad asked in German: “Where are we going?”
“We are going out to shoot you,” one of them replied.
Dad fell silent. He believed them, but felt such rage that “there was no goddamned way I was going to tell them anything,” he said.
After about an hour of driving in silence, they turned the car around and returned him to his cell unharmed.
By this time, Dad was getting better at telling the Germans only what they already knew. But it was tricky because, of course, he didn’t know what they knew. It required a bit of a dance, he says. “You kind of talked around it, talked around it and you kind of got the idea.”
Once Dad heard about another comrade who had just been imprisoned. Dad enlisted the warden’s help so he could crawl to the man’s cell to find out what the man had told the Germans.
For some reason, neither the German officer nor the Danish collaborators who performed most of the dirty work during interrogations harmed my father. Perhaps he performed the dance better than others. But eventually, the Gestapo grew tired of it and sent him to Froslev, a camp on Danish soil where many resistance fighters, including Egeskjold languished.
Dad swears he didn’t suffer there either. They were crowded, four men in two single bunks pushed together, but they got enough to eat and labour was mostly just standing around with a shovel.
The war left Dad a tolerant man
In the last month of the war a Swedish count named Folke Bernadotte, who headed the Swedish Red Cross, managed to negotiate a deal with SS commander Heinrich Himmler, who was trying to save his own skin. Himmler agreed to release Danish and Norwegian prisoners and later many Jews. Bernadotte crossed into Germany with a caravan of white buses marked with the Red Cross symbol, heading for the concentration camps. His buses became a common sight as they transported 30,000 camp prisoners across Denmark en route to neutral Sweden — the count’s homeland — in the final months of the war.
Many of the buses would stop at Froslev on their way through to Sweden. Dad recalls seeing emaciated rescued prisoners offering incredibly intricate bone carvings for sale for a pack of cigarettes. “They would have taken hundreds of man-hours to complete,” he says. “They were very very unique. Unfortunately I didn’t buy anything.”
Then one day, all the prisoners were ordered to stand in parade formation outside the barracks. Names were called out and those prisoners, including Dad and Egeskjold, were told to step forward.
“We had no idea what was going on,” says Dad, adding that a wave of anxiety passed through him. They were loaded onto 50 of Bernadotte’s white buses where they discovered the true nature of the expedition.
They were free. As they drove the highways of Denmark en route route to Sweden, people stood on the roadsides cheering and waving.
“It was a very joyful ride,” says Dad.
Dad saw Ove Nielsen once after the war. Neilsen tried to talk to him, but Dad refused. He regrets that now. Neilsen wasn’t a collaborator, he says. “He was just weak.”
Unable to face his comrades, Neilsen ended up moving to South Africa where he lived out his life.
War changes a person and in many cases, it seems to change them for the worse, instilling hate where none existed before. But Dad emerged from the war a tolerant man, who could see that many of the German soldiers, not the SS or Gestapo, but regular army soldiers were decent people.
He remembers two who stopped on the highway offering to help repair a flat tire on a truck loaded with weapons Dad was driving. He remembers the jail warden and the many others who secretly helped people in need. He forgives Ove Neilsen and he holds fast to an ideal of ethnic and political inclusion like Canada tries to uphold.
After university, Dad tried to emigrate to the U.S. and came up against the anti-communist campaign of senator Joe McCarthy. He proudly said yes, he had associated with communists. They were his comrades working to defeat the Nazis.
He was denied entry to the U.S., which, from my point of view, was a good thing. He met my mother in Toronto, and I later was able to brag about his jail time.
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