1. Why Are You Running?
"I'll race you to the corner, Ellen!" Annemarie adjusted the thick
leather pack on her back so that her schoolbooks balanced evenly.
"Ready?" She looked at her best friend.
Ellen made a face. "No," she said, laughing. "You know I can't
beat you -—my legs aren't as long. Can't we just walk, like civilized
people?" She was a stocky ten-year-old, unlike lanky Annemarie.
"We have to practice for the athletic meet on Friday—I know
I'm going to win the girls' race this week. I was second last week,
but I've been practicing every day. Come on, Ellen," Annemarie
pleaded, eyeing the distance to the next corner of the Copenhagen
street. "Please?"
Ellen hesitated, then nodded and shifted her own rucksack of
books against her shoulders. "Oh, all right. Ready," she said.
"Go!" shouted Annemarie, and the two girls were off, racing
along the residential sidewalk. Annemarie's silvery blond hair flew
behind her, and Ellen's dark pigtails bounced against her shoulders.
"Wait for me!" wailed little Kirsti, left behind, but the two older
girls weren't listening.
Annemarie outdistanced her friend quickly, even though one of
her shoes came untied as she sped along the street called
Østerbrogade, past the small shops and cafés of her neighborhood
here in northeast Copenhagen. Laughing, she skirted an elderly lady
in black who carried a shopping bag made of string. A young
woman pushing a baby in a carriage moved aside to make way. The
corner was just ahead.
Annemarie looked up, panting, just as she reached the corner.
Her laughter stopped. Her heart seemed to skip a beat.
"Halte!" the soldier ordered in a stern voice.
The German word was as familiar as it was frightening.
Annemarie had heard it often enough before, but it had never been
directed at her until now.
Behind her, Ellen also slowed and stopped. Far back, little Kirsti
was plodding along, her face in a pout because the girls hadn't
waited for her.
Annemarie stared up. There were two of them. That meant two
helmets, two sets of cold eyes glaring at her, and four tall shiny
boots planted firmly on the sidewalk, blocking her path to home.
And it meant two rifles, gripped in the hands of the soldiers. She
stared at the rifles first. Then, finally, she looked into the face of the
soldier who had ordered her to halt.
"Why are you running?" the harsh voice asked. His Danish was
very poor. Three years, Annemarie thought with contempt. Three
years they've been in our country, and still they can't speak our
language.
"I was racing with my friend," she answered politely. "We have
races at school every Friday, and I want to do well, so I—" Her
voice trailed away, the sentence unfinished. Don't talk so much, she
told herself. Just answer them, that's all.
She glanced back. Ellen was motionless on the sidewalk, a few
yards behind her. Farther back, Kirsti was still sulking, and walking
slowly toward the corner. Nearby, a woman had come to the
doorway of a shop and was standing silently, watching.
One of the soldiers, the taller one, moved toward her.
Annemarie recognized him as the one she and Ellen always called,
in whispers, "the Giraffe" because of his height and the long neck
that extended from his stiff collar. He and his partner were always
on this corner.
He prodded the corner of her backpack with the stock of his
rifle. Annemarie trembled. "What is in here?" he asked loudly. From
the corner of her eye, she saw the shopkeeper move quietly back
into the shadows of the doorway, out of sight.
"Schoolbooks," she answered truthfully.
"Are you a good student?" the soldier asked. He seemed to be
sneering.
"Yes."
"What is your name?"
"Annemarie Johansen."
"Your friend—is she a good student, too?" lie was looking
beyond her, at Ellen, who hadn't moved.
Annemarie looked back, too, and saw that Ellen's face, usually
rosy-cheeked, was pale, and her dark eyes were wide.
She nodded at the soldier. "Better than me," she said.
"What is her name?"
"Ellen."
"And who is this?" he asked, looking to Annemarie's side. Kirsti
had appeared there suddenly, scowling at everyone.
"My little sister." She reached down for Kirsti's hand, hut Kirsti,
always stubborn, refused it and put her hands on her hips defiantly.
The soldier reached down and stroked her little sister's short,
tangled curls. Stand still, Kirsti, Annemarie ordered silently, praying
that somehow the obstinate five-year-old would receive the
message.
But Kirsti reached up and pushed the soldier's hand away.
"Don't," she said loudly.
Both soldiers began to laugh. They spoke to each other in rapid
German that Annemarie couldn't understand.
"She is pretty, like my own little girl," the tall one said in a more
pleasant voice.
Annemarie tried to smile politely.
"Go home, all of you. Go study your schoolbooks. And don't
run. You look like hoodlums when you run."
The two soldiers turned away. Quickly Annemarie reached
down again and grabbed her sister's hand before Kirsti could resist.
Hurrying the little girl along, she rounded the corner. In a moment
Ellen was beside her. They walked quickly, not speaking, with
Kirsti between them, toward the large apartment building where
both families lived.
When they were almost home, Ellen whispered suddenly, "I was
so scared."
"Me too," Annemarie whispered back.
As they turned to enter their building, both girls looked straight
ahead, toward the door. They did it purposely so that they would
not catch the eyes or the attention of two more soldiers, who stood
with their guns on this corner as well. Kirsti scurried ahead of them
through the door, chattering about the picture she was bringing
home from kindergarten to show Mama. For Kirsti, the soldiers
were simply part of the landscape, something that had always been
there, on every corner, as unimportant as lampposts, throughout her
remembered life.
"Are you going to tell your mother?" Ellen asked Annemarie as
they trudged together up the stairs. "I'm not. My mother would be
upset."
"No, I won't, either. Mama would probably scold me for running
on the street."
She said goodbye to Ellen on the second floor, where Ellen
lived, and continued on to the third, practicing in her mind a cheerful
greeting for her mother: a smile, a description of today's spelling
test, in which she had done well.
But she was too late. Kirsti had gotten there first.
"And he poked Annemarie's book bag with his gun, and then he
grabbed my hair!" Kirsti was chattering as she took off her sweater
in the center of the apartment living room. "But I wasn't scared.
Annemarie was, and Ellen, too. But not me!"
Mrs. Johansen rose quickly from the chair by the window where
she'd been sitting. Mrs. Rosen, Ellen's mother, was there, too, in the
opposite chair. They'd been having coffee together, as they did
many afternoons. Of course it wasn't really coffee, though the
mothers still called it that: "having coffee." There had been no real
coffee in Copenhagen since the beginning of the Nazi occupation.
Not even any real tea. The mothers sipped at hot water flavored
with herbs.
"Annemarie, what happened? What is Kirsti talking about?" her
mother asked anxiously.
"Where's Ellen?" Mrs. Rosen had a frightened look.
"Ellen's in your apartment. She didn't realize you were here,"
Annemarie explained. "Don't worry. It wasn't anything. It was the
two soldiers who stand on the corner of Østerbrogade—you've
seen them; you know the tall one with the long neck, the one who
looks like a silly giraffe?" She told her mother and Mrs. Rosen of
the incident, trying to make it sound humorous and unimportant. But
their uneasy looks didn't change.
"I slapped his hand and shouted at him," Kirsti announced
importantly.
"No, she didn't, Mama," Annemarie reassured her mother.
"She's exaggerating, as she always does."
Mrs. Johansen moved to the window and looked down to the
street below. The Copenhagen neighborhood was quiet; it looked
the same as always: people coming and going from the shops,
children at play, the soldiers on the corner.
She spoke in a low voice to Ellen's mother. "They must be edgy
because of the latest Resistance incidents. Did you read in De Frie
Danske about the bombings in Hillerød and Nørrebro?"
Although she pretended to be absorbed in unpacking her
schoolbooks, Annemarie listened, and she knew what her mother
was referring to. De Frie Danske—The Free Danes —was an
illegal newspaper; Peter Neilsen brought it to them occasionally,
carefully folded and hidden among ordinary books and papers, and
Mama always burned it after she and Papa had read it. But
Annemarie heard Mama and Papa talk, sometimes at night, about
the news they received that way: news of sabotage against the
Nazis, bombs hidden and exploded in the factories that produced
war materials, and industrial railroad lines damaged so that the
goods couldn't be transported.
And she knew what Resistance meant. Papa had explained,
when she overheard the word and asked. The Resistance fighters
were Danish people—no one knew who, because they were very
secret—who were determined to bring harm to the Nazis however
they could. They damaged the German trucks and cars, and
bombed their factories. They were very brave. Sometimes they
were caught and killed.
"I must go and speak to Ellen," Mrs. Rosen said, moving toward
the door. "You girls walk a different way to school tomorrow.
Promise me, Annemarie. And Ellen will promise, too."
"We will, Mrs. Rosen, but what does it matter? There are
German soldiers on every corner."
"They will remember your faces," Mrs. Rosen said, turning in the
doorway to the hall. "It is important to be one of the crowd, always.
Be one of many. Be sure that they never have reason to remember
your face." She disappeared into the hall and closed the door
behind her.
"He'll remember my face, Mama," Kirsti announced happily,
"because he said I look like his little girl. He said I was pretty."
"If he has such a pretty little girl, why doesn't he go back to her
like a good father?" Mrs. Johansen murmured, stroking Kirsti's
cheek. "Why doesn't he go back to his own country?"
"Mama, is there anything to eat?" Annemarie asked, hoping to
take her mother's mind away from the soldiers.
"Take some bread. And give a piece to your sister."
"With butter?" Kirsti asked hopefully.
"No butter," her mother replied. "You know that."
Kirsti sighed as Annemarie went to the breadbox in the kitchen.
"I wish I could have a cupcake," she said. "A big yellow cupcake,
with pink frosting."
Her mother laughed. "For a little girl, you have a long memory,"
she told Kirsti. "There hasn't been any butter, or sugar for
cupcakes, for a long time. A year, at least."
"When will there be cupcakes again?"
"When the war ends," Mrs. Johansen said. She glanced through
the window, down to the street corner where the soldiers stood,
their faces impassive beneath the metal helmets. "When the soldiers
leave."