The Great (Danish) Escape.

My war didn't really start until 9th April 1940 when the German army invaded Denmark where I lived on a beautiful farm with my English father,Danish mother,seven year old brother John and three year old sister Anette. It was just over a month before my twelfth birthday.
I remember standing outside in the front of the farm watching wave after wave of planes flying over us.I don't think I realised the gravity of the situation unfolding before me at the time,and for three and a half years things seemed pretty quiet.
The Germans wanted to make Denmark a model protectorate so they kept a fairly low profile.
There was rationing but nothing near as severe as in this country or Holland.
I went to Copenhagen to live with my grandmother in order to attend school there,and her flat was on a street where a german regiment walked along on their way from their barracks to the centre of the city,singing martial songs mainly the Horst Wessel.
Then,in summer of 1943 the germans arrested the Danish police and that sparked off a resistance movement which I imagine had been quietly preparing for an excuse to act!,Military trains were blown up and German occupied buildings mysteriously caught fire.
There were also rumours that Danish jews would be rounded up,and as we fell into that catagory ,it was decided in late september that it was time to get out.
First we went rather naively ,to our summer house about twenty miles from the farm,thinking we could stay hidden there for the duration.That turned out to be a bad idea, so after just one night we gathered our few belongings and moved to another (friends) summerhouse for another night,finally spending a week on some other friends farm nearby.
However, it became clear that we would have to leave the country ,and a lovely young member of the resistance arranged for us to get across to Sweden. Taxis were only allowed to go 50 kilometeres from their base so we were deposited at the side of the road with our suitcases looking very much like refugees!!
Eventually another taxi picked us up and took us to Gilleleje on the North coast of Zealand,to a fisherman's cottage.There were people who had been there for days on end but after less than an hour we were driven down to the harbour and taken to a small fishing vessel. A man stood upon the deck and said he had promised people passage on that boat,and he wouldn't let anyone on board until he saw familliar faces.Other fishermen told him that the Germans were at the harbour entrance shooting, "so let's get this lot away now that they are here" (!) So eventually we got on board,about a hundred and fifty of us in all,squashed down in the hot ans stinking hold of the boat,which was reeking of fish,and off we set.
We heard later that a German gunboat had come out from Elsinore in persuit ,but by the time it caught up with us we were in Swedish territorial waters.After about two and a half houres we landed at Hoganas in Sweden.One of the outstanding memories of my life is being helped ashore by soldiers and being greeted with "welcome to Sweden ;Here you can live in peace".
It turned out that the people who should have been on the boat were infact hiding in the church loft in Gilleleje. They were betrayed ,and sent to a concentration camp in Germany.
So we spent the rest of the war living comfortably and safely in Sweden,and returned with much flag-waving and jubilation ,to a liberated Denmark in late May 1945.
Sonja Sichel.

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