Hitler's Canary

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  My brother stood up so quickly lie almost knocked Mama over. “Why aren’t yon doing something? Do yon know what the British arc calling us? Hitler’s canary! I’ve heard it on the radio, on the BBC. They say he has ns in a cage and we jus sit and sing any time lie wants.”

  Bamse is used to drama—his mother is a famous actress, and his best friend, Anton, is one of the most daring boys in all of Denmark. But this is different. He knows he should be afraid, but he doesn’t know yet what he should be afraid of. The Germans? The British? The French?

  “We were theater people. We didn’t get involved in these things. It had nothing to do with us,” he says. Yet now Bamse must decide: should he take his father’s advice and not stir up trouble? Or should he follow his brother into the Resistance and take part in the most demanding role of his life?

  Sandi Toksvig brings to life the Nazi occupation of Denmark and the courage of ordinary Danes—based on her father’s life—in a remarkably funny and gripping novel.

  HitleR’S

  CANARY

  Sandi Toksvig

  HitleR’S

  CANARY

  A Deborah Brodie Book

  Roaring Brook Press

  New Milford, Connecticut

  For Teddy

  Copyright © 2005 by Sandi Toksvig

  First published in Great Britain by Doubleday,

  an imprint of Random House Children’s Books

  A Deborah Brodie Book

  Published by Roaring Brook Press

  Roaring Brook Press is a division of Holtzbrinck

  Publishing Holdings Limited Partnership

  143 West Street, New Milford, Connecticut 06776

  All rights reserved

  Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company, Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Toksvig, Sandi.

  Hitler’s canary / Sandi Toksvig.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Deborah Brodie book.”

  Summary: Ten-year-old Bamse and his Jewish friend Anton participate in the Danish Resistance during World War II.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59643-247-5

  ISBN-10: 1-59643-247-0

  1. Denmark—History—German occupation, 1940-1945—Juvenile fiction.

  [1. Denmark—History—German occupation, 1940-1945—Fiction.

  2. World War, 1939-1945—Jews—Rescue—Denmark.

  3. Jews—History—20th century—Fiction.] I.Title.

  PZ7.T57347Hit 2007

  [Fie]—dc22 2006016607

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

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  For details, contact: Director of Special Markets, Holtzbrinck Publishers.

  Book design by Robin Hoffmann/Brand X Studios

  Printed in the United States of America

  First American edition March 2007

  The one condition necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

  ˜

  Edmund Burke

  OVERTURE AND BEGINNERS

  TIME: April 1940

  PLACE: Copenhagen,

  Denmark

  The day the Germans invaded I was asleep on Henry V’s throne. It was 1940. I was ten and I was asleep on the throne in the middle of the stage at the Royal Copenhagen theater. I suppose it made it all seem even more dramatic. The real King Henry, of course, had been dead for a long time, but I had seen my Uncle Max play him so often that I dreamed about Henry and his great battles. I imagined I was making wonderful speeches, calling the soldiers to cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!” I knew the words:

  … when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger.

  I had heard the speech a million times from the wings of the theater. It was stirring stuff, even for a small Danish boy.

  That night, April 9, there had been a big party on the stage. All the actors had done little scenes and everyone had wept when my mother did her piece from Hamlet where the queen says that poor, mad Ophelia has drowned herself in the river. EvenTorvald the comic cried and said Mama could move an onion to weep. Mama had bowed low and still for a moment and there was this tremendous hush. She knew she had everyone in the palm of her hand because she looked at me and winked. Then she stood up and gave the tinkling laugh that got such good reviews in her production of A DolVs House. It was as if all the sad bits had been a great joke and everyone felt better immediately. Remembering to laugh when things were bad was what Mama did best.

  Father had painted a little congratulations card for everyone, with the red-and-white flags of Denmark spelling out their names. Thomas, who was wardrobe master, had provided fancy dress and there were kings and clowns, cowboys and Indians, courtiers and peasants, ballet dancers and stilt walkers and even two men from the electrics crew dressed as a cow. Thomas had found me a top hat and waistcoat and said I could be “the little ringmaster.” I don’t know what I must have looked like in the huge hat and my usual baggy gray shorts, which came to my knee, but I thought it was great getting dressed up. The old season was over and everyone needed to relax a little. Soon there would be new plays, with hours of rehearsal and lots of tension and excitement, but for now it was time to have fun.

  I loved the theater and everything about it: the dusty smell, the old wooden boards where anything could happen, the excitement, the nerves, the showing off and the fun. From my mother I learned to love it when the place was full and the audience was hushed. My mother was an actress through and through. My father was in the theater too, but he was a designer and painter. From him I learned how wonderful it could be when the stage was empty, waiting for the next great set to be put up—that moment when the theater could become anything from a sailing ship to a Bedouin desert. My father would stand on the stage and show me the drawings of the world he wanted to build.

  “Look, Bamse,” he would say. “Just imagine where we will take everyone next time.” He and I would stand there and create magic with his paints and brushes and imagination.

  We lived in a make-believe world and it was hard for me to imagine doing anything else with my life. My mother was not just any actress. She was one of the most famous women in Denmark. She was what the Danish critics called “a leading light.” Elegant and beautiful, she was brilliant at Chekhov, at comedy and, of course, at Shakespeare. Mama and Papa had met onstage and I had been hanging around the theater since Mama had first carried me on in a music revue as the brand-new baby of a girl who had got into trouble. Then there was Uncle Max (who was not my real uncle but my godfather). Uncle Max was a wonderful actor and he and Mama had played every famous couple there was in the theater. I sometimes think the audience thought they were married in real life, they were so good together. They could make you cry and laugh at the same moment. Maybe that’s why we were so good at it once the war came.

  On the night of the big party no one had been talking about politics. There was a war going on in Europe but so far Denmark had been left alone. I don’t remember being afraid, even though in those days I was sometimes fearful of other things and slept with a light on. After everyone had done their party pieces we all sang old Danish songs. The Danes love singing and Uncle Max had written some new words especially for that night, making jokes and poking fun at everyone. My big brother, Orlando, who was sixteen, and my fourteen-year-old sister, Masha, had gone home, but I hid out of the way so as not to catch Mama’s eye and make her realize how late it was. I had watched the grown-ups laughing and drinking beer. Then Thomas had put me on the throne and made me deliver one of Henry’s speeches and everyone had clapped. I had fallen asleep on the throne with the sound still ringing in my ears.

/>   When I awoke in the morning I wasn’t sure where I was. The electricians had gone home. Perhaps they had walked through the streets of Copenhagen still dressed as a cow. A drunk cow heading home. Even at a party the backstage people never last as long as the actors. The men had turned out the lights except for the one safety lamp that always burns night and day in every theater in the world. Now the whole stage was lit with a single bulb on a stand in the corner. The music had stopped but I wasn’t alone. There were various sleeping bodies about the place, and Kaufmann, who played the piano for the sketches, seemed to have collapsed across the keyboard. None of the slumbering shapes looked like Mother or Father but I wasn’t afraid. This was my home.

  I rubbed my eyes and then listened. I could hear a faint humming. Like thunder coming closer. No. More like a deep droning. Like the chorus in Carmen heading toward the stage for the “Toreador Song,” except without the harmony. Suddenly the door to the dressing-room corridor banged open at the back. It was Thomas, who as well as being the wardrobe master was Mama’s personal dresser. He looked frail and shaky, which was odd. Thomas was one of life’s cheerful people. He was so used to drama on and off stage that I had never seen anything really upset him. He had been in the theater since he was a boy and I think life for him was mostly pretend. Thomas worried about Mama, or about the costumes or about his own hair, but not about anything else. He looked at me and his thin body was shaking.

  “Oh Bamse, oh my God, oh my God, they have come, they have come.” He choked as he spoke. “They have come.”

  The humming was getting louder. Now I couldn’t just hear it, I could feel it in my chest. Thomas was sobbing and choking. I made him sit on Henry’s throne and waited till I felt I could leave him. He was so paralyzed with fear that I didn’t know what to do, but I thought I had better find Mama. Mama would make him all right again. I left Thomas sitting on the huge gold chair while all the partygoers still slept all over the stage. He looked like a tiny king with all his court dead around him in the shadows.

  I ran to Mother’s dressing room to see if she was there. It was empty. Just the usual props and costumes and the smell of greasepaint, which in those days everyone still used for stage makeup. I opened her window and looked out into the street. Below me the small cobbled square was full of people staring up into the sky in disbelief. The usual bright blue spring sky of Copenhagen was crowded with heavy gray planes. I didn’t know it then but they were German Junkers Ju-52 transport planes: heavy, snub-nosed things with their wheels almost touching the chimney pots. They were flying in tight formation over the red-tiled rooftops of Denmark’s capital city. It was almost like an air show. They were so low I could clearly make out the white circle with the German swastika symbol on their wings. It wasn’t something I had seen much before but it had been in the papers and I knew what it was.

  The planes were dropping paper. Green paper. Leaflets. Some people in the street were running and I could see cyclists tearing off in all directions. An old man had paused to shake his stick at the sky.

  “What is it?” I called out to him.

  “This,” he cried, pointing at the planes in fury, “is our enemy!”

  The green leaflets continued to flutter down. I put my hand out of the window and grabbed one. It was a strange mix of Danish, German, and Norwegian. I remembered thinking how dreadful my teacher at school would have thought it was.

  OPROP, said the headline—ATTENTION.

  It was addressed to the soldiers and people of Denmark and said that the Germans had come to protect them from the evil plans of the British and the French; that all Danes were to go on with their lives as if everything were normal. I knew I should be afraid but I didn’t know yet what of: the Germans? The British? The French? We were theater people. We didn’t get involved in these things. It was nothing to do with us.

  The dressing-room door opened and Mama stood there in her shimmering royal gown of the night before. She looked perfect. As if nothing had happened at all.

  “Mother,” I exclaimed, “I think the Germans have come.”

  “Yes, dear,” she replied. “We must change at once.”

  ACT I, SCENE ONE

  TIME: April 1940

  PLACE: Copenhagen

  This is my story. It is my story of when the war came to Denmark in 1940. The Second World War. I can’t give you the whole picture of what happened; just what I saw and what people told me. There are hundreds of personal stories from that time, but this is not one in which all Germans were bad and all Danes were good. It didn’t work that way. There were just some good people and some bad people and it wasn’t always easy to tell the difference.

  I often think of Thomas sitting on the throne at the moment the Germans invaded. I wish I had remembered to tell Mama. I’m sure it would have pleased her. Mama lived and breathed drama. As far as she was concerned, there was an appropriate part and costume for everything that happened in life. She believed that it was all part of what she called Livskunt—the art of living.

  Mr. Shakespeare once said that “all the world’s a stage,” but I think even he would have been amazed at how much Mama believed it to be true. To be honest, Mama’s insistence that there was an outfit for every event was not always easy for the family. Parents’ evenings at my school, for example, could be a nightmare. If she thought I was doing well, she would arrive dressed in gold silk and sequins to draw attention to herself as the mother of a brilliant boy. If I did badly, she came in rags and old shoes like a poor beggar woman with no money to provide her poor boy with even a pencil. Who could blame her if he wasn’t at the top of the class? Sometimes it tried my father’s patience.

  “For goodness’ sake, Marie, you must give the boy some sense of the real world as well. You can’t keep pretending everything is a performance. You’re his mother. Have you no proper advice for him to help him along his way?”

  My mother looked at my father and shook her head in disgust. “Of course I have advice for him, Peter,” she replied in a soft, low voice that could nonetheless be heard in Sweden. She put her hand out and held my chin so that I looked straight into her face.

  “Bamse, darling, if you are ever asked to do Shakespeare in the theater, then always play a king or a queen—royalty always get a chair and they never carry props.”

  As far as I remember, it’s the only guidance in life that my mother ever gave me, yet I learned so much from her.

  If Mama was the life and soul of the party, then my father was the one who paid the piper. He was a small, gentle man. He was handsome but he had, as Mama used to say, “a face fit for a coin.” From one side he was perfect, but on the other a great red stain spread from his forehead to his chin. It was as though someone had poured a glass of dark red liquid over that side of his face and it had stained it forever. I never really noticed it. It’s only when I look at old photographs that I remember the mark was there at all, but I know Father thought about it. All his adult life he looked at my mother in wonder, amazed that someone so beautiful should have married him.

  “The swan and the ugly duckling,” he would laugh when they hugged, which they did often.

  Papa was a wonderful painter. If my mother could play Ibsen better than anyone in the whole of Scandinavia, he could paint something so real you wanted to reach out and grab it. He did the sets at the theater and for extra money he painted people’s portraits and did cartoons for the newspapers. I didn’t know it then, but her acting and his brushes were to save our lives. I don’t think my parents knew anything about war before it came. I probably didn’t know anything about anything.

  It was cold that winter—bitter cold—and by the time April came, there was still a thick frost in the air. No one thought anything about the great merchant ships steaming right past the Danish security forces to dock at Langelinie Pier in the heart of Copenhagen. Everyone presumed that the ships brought coal. They always brought coal. We needed coal. Like I said, it was cold. The freighters sailed right into the heart of
the city: up past the army headquarters, past Amalienborg, the palace where the king lived. But they did not bring coal. The boats were like a modern Trojan horse—you know, the one with all the Greek soldiers inside. Only, these were full of German troops.

  The morning I heard the droning sound Mama sent me out to find Father and bring him home. I ran out of the stage door into the street and banged into a man standing with his back to the door. I slipped and fell and lay across his high black boots. I looked up and he laughed.

  “What’s the hurry?” he asked in German as he reached for my collar and pulled me to my feet. He was wearing a green uniform I had never seen before. It was a dark olive color but seemed to be covered in coal dust. He flicked a cigarette away and went to join three other soldiers standing nearby. A small crowd of Danes had gathered on the corner, looking at them but not saying anything. It was as if they were watching a play.

  “What’s happening?” I asked one of them.

  “We’ve been occupied,” said a woman. She spat on the ground and then walked away, pushing her bicycle.

  All across the city, people were going about their business but the atmosphere was strange. It was quiet, as if the play had not yet begun. I headed toward the newspaper offices of Berlingske Tiden on Pilestraede, where I thought I might find my father. Over at the British embassy several trucks full of German soldiers had arrived. They were herding out diplomats and office staff. Once again several Danes stood watching in silence on the other side of the street.

  Suddenly a young man about my brother’s age called out, “Hurrah for Britain!” and the other Danes nodded in silent agreement.

  “Anyone attempting to interfere will be shot!” barked a German soldier in broken Danish to the gathering.