A Child's Tapestry of War - Softcover

Ipsen, Anne

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9781890676117: A Child's Tapestry of War

Softcover

ISBN 10: 189067611X ISBN 13: 9781890676117

Publisher: Beaver's Pond Press, Incorporated, 1998

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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?"

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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.

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