Leeway Cottage by Beth Gutcheon

Author:Beth Gutcheon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

At Kaj’s hospital, the wards are full of Jews. So are the chapel, the basement corridors, and the nurses’ quarters. Sunday, students found some forty people, too frightened to stay at home but with nowhere else to go, hiding in Ørsted Park in the rain. (This is terrifying in itself; Ørsted Park is not large and there is not enough cover there for a good game of hide-and-seek.) They had them brought in by ambulance. But the word has spread that the hospitals are safe havens, and now more Jews arrive in groups, throughout each day, carrying flowers as if to visit a patient. For several nights they have been taken in Falck vehicles and taxis to Christianshavn, where there are several different escape routes set up. A girl in a red beret runs a rescue transport out of the North Harbor. Another is the Dragør lighthouse boat. Another has been set up leaving Dragør itself, just to the south, and there are more down the coast sailing from Køge and Strøby and various beaches in Stevns, to Malmö in Sweden.

But someone has told the Germans about the hospitals, and since last night, Kaj’s is surrounded by Wehrmacht soldiers. The doctors meet in an anxious huddle; they are all in danger now if a search is begun, as they are sure it will be. Someone has an idea. Very early in the morning, before the officials can arrive for the day at Dagmarhus and order Gestapo troops to the hospital, a funeral cortege leaves the grounds. The hearse is packed with Jews, as are the thirty hired cars that follow in stately order. The “mourners” clutch their bunches of flowers and pass unchecked through the line of soldiers. They drive to Lyngby, a northern suburb, where by now there is a group ready to house them and feed them until boats can be found to take them across.

Several more hospitals use the funeral trick that day and the next. But in Gilleleje, Gestapo Juhl has sealed the harbor. The Jews who have heard of the schooner and come to that village are smuggled out to the countryside to hide in barns and farmyards as Gestapo men arrive to search the town. When the Germans have gone and night falls, the Jews are brought back and hidden again in the church attic and in the parish hall; no one knows what else to do. It’s cold in the attic. Someone delivers soup and meat but it’s so dark they can’t distribute the food or eat it without talking. The pastor comes up to pray with them and bless them, but he is free afterward to go back to his house. When the trapdoor opens again at last, it shows them the thing they fear most. German helmets.

A Gestapo man, with another right behind him, pushes head and shoulders into the attic space, holding a lantern aloft. The light finds the uneaten food, and the buckets, and the eighty pairs of frightened eyes.

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