Bodil winced.

“Aw, let’s not bother with Derdo and Laila. All those little girls want to do is to fly back and forth on their swings, doing that silly little chant about Derdo and Laila, Lassiman, Suomi, Finland, over and over.”

Mrs. Poulsen looked up over glasses. She sent Bodil a glance of disapproval. “That little chant of theirs,” she said, “is all these poor girls have left from their life back home. After the Russians invaded Finland, their parents decided to send Derdo and Laila to Denmark to be safe from the fighting in their own country. And before they sent them away, the parents made their girls remember these words by chanting them over and over again. This way they won’t forget who they are and where they have come from.”

Bodil said, “But why can’t they play by themselves in Mrs. Olsen’s garden? They’ve got that nice swing set put up for them on the lawn.”

“Shame on you, young lady, for having a short memory,” Mrs. Poulsen said.

”Remember, when Mrs. Olsen took in these refugee girls, she asked you to come over to play with them? Feel free to come over as much as you like, she said. That’s how you can help them to feel at home here.”

“But,” Bodil said, “I never promised to play with them every day!”

Morten said quickly. “Why don’t we play with the girls from Finland tomorrow?”

“Then we can’t play at all in the hayloft tomorrow,” said Bodil. “Remember how upset they became that day in the cow-barn, when we heard those bomber planes flying over? Remember how they stormed out the door, looking up to see where the planes were going, and screaming, covering their ears with their hands. They thought we were about to be bombed.”

“All right then, we’ll play with them in their garden tomorrow,” Morten said. “They’re not afraid of planes as long as they can see where they’re headed.”

“Poor things,” Mrs. Poulsen said. “They must’ve been terrified when their home town was bombed. I suppose they and their parents were hiding in the cellar and they couldn’t see out, and they had no idea whether the planes were coming for them.”

The two Finnish girls were younger than the rest of us kids. They were fostered out with our neighbours while their parents in Finland fought the Red Army invading their country. Hosting refugee kids from countries involved in the First World War was routine in some smaller countries of Europe that had succeeded in maintaining neutrality, offering safe havens to children endangered by war elsewhere. During and after WWI our community hosted ‘Wiener-children’ from Austria, and later from 1939 and onwards, Finland was forced to send large numbers of children to safety in Sweden and Denmark.

Although they learned to speak Danish in no time, Derdo and Laila played mostly with each other, rarely with us. When they did come over, they went straight for our double swing-set. Swinging back and forth in unison, they chanted “Derdo and Laila Lassiman Suomi Finland,” over and over. We understood it was their way to hang on to their identity and origin.

Soon afterwards we, local Danish kids, became refugees in our own country when the Wehrmacht (German Army) confiscated our homes for their own use.

Years later I attended an international conference in Helsinki. On the first conference-day, Finland’s National Bank invited participants to an elaborate reception in late afternoon.

I arrived late, and everyone sat politely eying the food without sampling, waiting for the bank director’s speech. I chose a vacant chair between some young Americans and three young Finish women who worked at the reception counter. Soon the conversation drowned out the chords of Sibelius’s Finlandia. Two of the women began to tease the Americans, pretending to give good advice about where to go for dinner. “No better place in town, they said, then than TFC near the Hilton Hotel. I struck up a conversation in (my best, imperfect) Swedish, with the third Finnish woman at our table, asking her if Lassiman was a common last name in Finland. I told her about the little refugee girls of my childhood. The third woman then turned to the others, talking in Swedish (Finland is, or certainly was at that time, a bilingual country, using both Finnish and Swedish as official languages). She told them that I understood they were having fun fooling the American guests about dinner options in town.

The two immediately changed their tune, suddenly dispensing excellent dinner advice, and the conversation turned to the hard recent history of Finland, first having a war with Stalin’s Russia foisted upon them that left them war-torn. Subsequently they were forced to pay (forced by Russia and its western Allies!) massive reparations to Soviet Russia.

Excerpt from chapter 30, The Storks came Back

He had just placed the set of cups on the next cow and was about to sit down with the previous one to squeeze out by hand the last drops of milk, when he heard angry voices. The noise came from the tiled milking parlor where the milk was collected and cooled before shipping.

Morten rushed off to the milking parlor to learn what the noise was about. He found Jost Jonsen standing in the middle of the floor, waving his hands in despair at a group of German women. Half a dozen refugees crowded around the freshly filled milk-cans. They refused to move aside for Jost, who was trying to place the full milk-cans into the large water-cooled collection basin near the door. The women began to lift the lids off and tried tipping the full cans to pour milk into an assortment of pots and pans they had brought.

In the scuffle they pushed over two of the milk-cans, spilling the contents into the floor drain. The women fell silent. Wide-eyed they watched the milk gurgling down the drain.

Uncle Holger, alerted by the tumult, came over from his office in the main building. He ordered the women outside. Some were crying, while others shouted with anger. Out in the farmyard he gave them a stern talking to in German.

By now most women were sobbing. Morten looked at their harrowed faces, shabby clothing and worn-out shoes, and he felt sorry for them. One woman stared at him with red-rimmed eyes, her face caked with dried tears. Suddenly she rushed over to give him a hug. After a moment’s surprise, Morten pulled free. He bolted to a safe distance, his mind in turmoil with feelings of pity and disgust all at once. He would always remember the feel of the woman’s embrace, her skeletal arms and shoulders clothed in thin rags, the shifting sharp-edged bones of her torso almost ready to poke out, and the sour odour clinging to skin, hair and clothing after weeks of living without enough water and soap to keep up personal hygiene.

The women drifted back to their quarters in the gym. Uncle Holger, his blue eyes darkened to the shade of rain clouds, watched them go. He placed an arm around Morten’s shoulders.

“Sometimes,” he said, “it is hard not to cry over spilt milk.”

This chapter is based on the following memoir:

Crying over spilt milk

By Hans Larsen

The times were tense. School came to an end after the (last available) substitute teacher suffered a breakdown. To keep me occupied and out of trouble, I was recruited to help the herdsman of the college farm looking after sixty cows, their calves, and a mob of perpetually hungry bacon pigs. The herdsman, Ole, did most of the work with the milking machines, leaving it to me to carry the buckets with foaming milk down to the tiled dairy-room. There I sent the milk through a filter into water-cooled jugs and returned the empty machine-buckets to Ole. One afternoon just as I shifted one of the milking contraptions over on top of another empty bucket, I spotted a handful of refugee women shouting with anger, pushing into the dairy-room, supposed to be strictly off-limits to the refugees. Ole couldn’t run from what he was doing, so I ran down to the intruders in the milking-room and pointed to the door. Needless to say, the women remained where they were, shouting “milch, milch, milch” and lots of other things I didn’t understand. Meanwhile Ole saw his chance to come down and join the fracas, shaking his head and pointing to the door energetically. No way! Two women teamed up to lift a full jug of milk out of the cooling basin, took the lid off and emptied the milk on the terrazzo floor, sending 50 liters of fresh milk down the drain. Ole stepped in front of the other jugs prepared to defend them with his life. He yelled at me to get hold of my uncle, the college principal, and I rushed to the office with the upsetting news. Together we ran to the dairy-room, arriving just in time to prevent the women from overpowering Ole. They stopped what they were doing and broke out crying. My uncle remained silent. He just stood there, looking with sad eyes at the women and the milk-drenched floor. The women wiped the tears off their faces and headed with sagging shoulders back to their assigned quarters.

“There are times,” my uncle said, watching the women disappear, “when it really isn’t any good to cry over spilt milk.”

Ole muttered, “Whatever happened to the daily milk-allowances the refugee administration hands out? That wasn’t enough?” Thoroughly riled, he added, “Those wretched Prussians! First they claimed to need more ‘lebensraum,’ then they stole our freedom, and now they come to waste our milk! What will be next?”

Excerpt from chapter TWENTY-TWO of The Storks came Back

Once again it was Saturday. Morten came home from school at lunch time wondering what to do with his afternoon off. He let himself into the house through the backdoor, surprised to find his mother home already, an hour early.

She seemed terribly upset judging by her face, red-eyed and streaked with tears. He found it hard to believe that his mother had been crying. She never did – not that he knew of.

“You had better pull up a chair,” she said, sobbing.

Snap left her basket to sit beside Morten’s chair. He reached down and ruffled her ears, bracing himself for whatever the bad news might be.

Mother reached across the table and took his hand.

“Your father won’t be coming home today – not for a long time, I fear. Mr. Johansen called me away from class this morning, to tell me. The Germans have rounded up all of the Danish policemen they could find, and sent them to prison camps in Germany. We don’t right know yet where Father was sent. They seem to have gone to two different camps, one called Neuengamme, the other a place named Buchenwald.”

Mother squeezed his hand and Morten squeezed hers, fighting against his tears. For a long time they sat without speaking. Morten swallowed to keep his lips from trembling. Mother patted his hand. Don’t cry,” she said. “Mr. Johansen thinks because all the police in one unit are kept together, they’ll be all right in the camps as long as they help one another to stay healthy. People are rushing to collect food and medicine to send to them, like they’ve been doing for other prison camps. So far, the Red Cross is still able to deliver packages and letters to Nazi prison camps. Father will surely come back, Morten. We have to believe and stay strong.”

Morten jumped up. He ran to the door muttering, “I forgot something. I won’t be long.”

“Where are you going?” his mother called after him. “Have a bite of lunch first.”

“I’m not hungry,” Morten shouted. He ran out to the woodshed followed by Snap. He picked up the wedge and the sledge hammer, gauging their weight. With his father gone, it would be his job from now on to split wood for the kitchen stove. He put the tools down. His head was spinning with thoughts. He didn’t feel up to splitting wood right now.