Fragments of Catastrophe – on testimonies of the bombing of the Institut Jeanne d’Arc

On March 21 1945 a British air raid had been planned with the target of the “Shellhus”, the Gestapo headquarters in occupied Copenhagen. The raid was requested by the Danish resistance movement.

The RAF heistated at first because of the risky nature of the planned attack: It called for extremely hazardous low-level flight, so they estimated, and since the headquarters were situated in central Copenhagen, many civilian lives might be lost. When they finally and carried out the attack, it became clear that their concern had been justified: During the attack, one of the RAF Mosquito aircrafts hit a lamp post , its wing was damaged and it’s crashed in a garage building right behind a school at Frederiksberg, Copenhagen – the Institut Jeanne d’Arc (commonly known as The French School). Seeing smoke and flames coming from the school, several of the aircrafts in the raid’s second and third wave mistook the school for the Shellhus target and proceeded to bomb the school. A private Catholic girls school, which nevertheless also admitted non-Catholic pupils, and boys were admitted in the schools kindergarten. In the bombing more than 100 civilians were killed, 86 of them children.

The French School after the bombardment. Photo: Scanpix

This was the only major loss of civilians during World War II in Denmark: We were lucky. We know this. Yet if a catastrophe had to happen, it could hardly have been more tragic: The accidental bombing of a school. At noon, on a week day, full of children and their beloved teachers, a staff of devout nuns attending their education. In this essay, I would like to discuss how the Danish nation as a culture has handled this traumatic incident.

If you had to answer the question very briefly it wouldn’t be completely out of line, I think, to say that it was handled badly. At least in the immediate aftermath. Since the 1970s the school children that survived the incident have spoken up about their experience and one thing that they – almost everyone of them – attest to is the experience that they were not allowed to talk about and process the experience of escaping the wrecked school, many of them trapped in rubble for hours before being rescued, many of them witnessing the violent deaths of school mates and teachers. Many of the survivors have reported experiencing flashbacks from the unprocessed trauma all through their lives.

There was one clear reason for this: The parents of surviving children have later revealed that the doctors and psychiatrists at the time all gave them the same advice: Don’t talk to your children about what has happened. Children forget if they’re not reminded. Change the subject if your child tries to discuss the incident. The parents, wishing only the best for their children, of course took this advice to heart in good faith.

But I also think that there might be another reason: I think everybody – not just those immediately affected – were eager to forget about this incident. Certainly, the date “March 21″ bears little consequence in Danish culture, compared to, say, “September 11″ which is instantly associated with traumatizing images. I think the utter meaninglessness of the incident can’t have helped.  The narrative of the bombing of the French School was so darned meaningless. It was a useless experience. If you disregard that one terrible catastrophe, the story of Denmark during WWII is almost bearable. We were occupied, but we were never one with the occupiers, and we had an active resistance movement. We worked against Nazi Germany in our own small way. But the trouble is of course that aircrafts that bombed the French School weren’t German aircrafts. They were there to help us, to carry out a mission that our own resistance movement had asked them to undertake. Hearing the RAF’s reasons for accepting the mission doesn’t exactly make the narrative any more glorious either. As one of the RAF pilots involved in the attack has stated:

There was a strategic reason for the the wish for an attack at such a late stage of the war: To keep the approximately 200,000 German soldiers in Denmark and prevent many of them to be sent to the fronts. This was Denmark’s great achievement in the war of the allies, and Field Marshall Montgomery himself declared that the Danish resistance movement was the best in all of Europe.”

My grandfather was in the resistance movement, and I’m proud of him and everything he and his friends did. But with the strategic reasoning behind the air raid on March 21 in mind, it’s hard for me not to think of the movement as playing the part of an annoying, yet harmless mosquito, momentarily distracting the Gestapo from fighting the real war. It’s not a reasonable way of looking at things, of course, but the sentiment is still there.

And then, just six weeks after the attack on the French School, the war ended. There was no resistance movement to protect any longer and celebrations ensued. Who could have wanted to remember the tragedy then?

The small objects
The lucid memories of the event attested by the survivors betray the fact that they felt this loss of meaningful narrative particularly badly. Artist and author Alice Maud Guldbrandsen, who survived the bombing at age five, has edited an anthology of testimonies from eye witnesses and survivors of the disaster (Tavshed blev min sang 2005 – “Silence Was My Song”) that gives a heartbreaking insight into the troubled mind of the surviving children trying to make sense of a terrible experience. In the following quote from this book, Guldbrandsen talks about her experience (translated into English by myself):

The cellar light started to flicker, it grew weaker and weaker, and then the darkness was total. Immediately afterwards a devastating crash was heard, after which everything came tumbling down over me. I have no sense of time during the period that I lay buried under the rubble. The memories I do have must have been from a time when I regained some level of consciousness. The first thing I recall is a powerful, almost panicked will to move upwards. I can still feel the struggle against the heavy counterweight from all around me. My arms, shoulders, legs and feet thrust desperately against the pressure from outside, and I use all the power I have in me. In the middle of my exertion, I feel my shoes coming off, one fell of after the other. I remember how it pained me to lose the red shoes, but that it was necessary in order to achieve my goal.
(…)
Startled,  I hear the sound of something that falls into the darkness, catching the light from outside in one short glimpse. Immediately afterwards my eyes are further blinded by a bright cone of light, and I hear a man shout: ‘Here’s another one.’ Two strong arms pull me up, and it feels like my body is severed in the middle, but I slide out slowly and then I’m free.
(…)
A man dressed in black and wearing a shiny helmet and a gas mask wraps me gently in a grey blanket, lifts me up and tosses me through the flames, and I land in the arms of another person in uniform. (…) After a few moments I’m on a wagon along with others. There are loud voices and a deep silence. The voices are crying, screaming, moaning and praying, but it is the silent passangers that I remember the most. (…) As the wagon drives away, I think about the red shoes burning in there in the thundering fire.
(…)
[In the time following immediately after the catastrophe] I felt as if I was living in my own closed world where everyone around me seemed like figures, moving around silently. I don’t know for how long this condition continued, but a certain gesture has been saved in my memory. Very often I would sit on the floor in my parents’ bedroom, looking almost apathetically into a little closet where my red shoes used to be. But it was emtpy and left me with nothing but despair and a longing that I was unable to express.”

Equally, another survivor giving her testimony in the book, Lene, has a vivid memory of the songbook that she had on her when her 1st grade singing class was abruptly ended by the bombardment. She, too, was rescued by a firefighter and brought away on a wagon:

The wagon brought us to Frederiksberg Hospital. I had some bruises on my one arm and a lot of chalk on my scalp, but i must have bled a lot, too, bcause there was blood on “My First Songbook” which I was hugging tight during the entire incident. Today that book is my visual memory of the catastrophe.”

This focus on objects is a thing that is to be seen in the testimonies of many of the surviving girls. Another girl, Marianna, who was five years old, found it crucial that a cloth napkin be saved:

I will never forget the moment when my mother found me in the hospital, not because I embraced her in tears, no, I was deeply disappointed that she wasn’t pleased that I had remembered to save the cloth napkin which she had ordered me that same morning not to throw away. Mother only said, her eyes filled with tears: ‘Never mind about the napkin, you are more important.’ Strange how a child can react, but this shows that I did not understand the catastrophe by the time of the accident, the reaction came later on.”

Another survivor, Vibeke, who was four years old, remembers being told that she and her classmates were to leave the school quickly, and they were strictly informed not to tbring anything with them, and that they were not to walk along the panels, not even to get their coats. When she was in the hallway, she was tempted to get her coat because it was a cold day, so she walked over to the coat-hook, but even when standing right in front of it, she didn’t dare to take down her coat: She remembered the prohibition and was afraid that something terrible might happen if she took the coat. Another survivor, Jane, remember risking her life to go get her beautiful green lunchbox which had belonged to her great-grandmother. Yet another survivor, Elisa, who was six, still keeps a little children’s cup that belonged to her best friend Viggo who perished during the bombardment.

As Marianna writes, it’s strange the way a child reacts, but this childish focus on the various small objects – a pair of shoes, a songbook, a lunch box – also seems significant to me in the national processing of the bombardment. Children do not always fully comprehend the consequences of a traumatic experience, but they know enough to realise it when there is something that they don’t understand, and they can be helped to grasp the situation if they are talked to and if their questions are listened to. As we know, this was not the case in the aftermath of the bombardment of the Institut Jeanne d’Arc, and I have to wonder if this is not part of the reason why the entire incident still seems so obscure? Why the survivors’ stories are stories of an unfathomable misery related to seemingly insignificant, fragmentary little every-day objects. Nobody wanted to see the big picture of the catastrophe, but of course it was there, and of course the children sensed it, despite being coaxed into forgetting. Particularly striking is the contrast between the dramatic situation and the children’s focus on something insignificant like a small cup in the testimony of another survivor, Suzanne, who was three years old. She was a classmate of Elisa’s who happened to be living in the same building as Suzanne, and Suzanne remembers a sinister detail that Elisa has apparently forgotten. She and her mother were at home anxiously waiting to hear any news about Elisa:

“Finally the door bell rang and there [Elisa] was, wearing her father’s coat which reached all the way down to the door mat, her face all black and her hair burnt. With gazing eyes she simply said: ‘Viggo is dead, Viggo is dead; I held his hand, and his head came off.’”

The Momument
What of the location of the incident then – the Ground Zero of the bombardment? As with the World Trade Centre in New York, this was the object of many debates after the bombardment. In Henrik Ahlmann’s thoroughly researched book about the catastrophe he references public debates between representatives of the families of the victims as well as the city administration. What, if anything, should be erected on the grounds where the now burnt-out, shaddered school lay? The city administration wanted to erect new apartment complexes on the grounds, and they got their way despite the parents’ expressed wishes to have a memorial garden on the grounds. It was agreed that a monument commemorating the tragedy should be raised, but this, too, was the cause of a heated debate. The city administration held a competition among artists, and the winning submission was offensively macabre to the parents: A three-metres tall momument showing a crashed, burning airplane in the background, and a mother with a small child in the foreground. The parents’ instead ordered a monument by another artist who had not been part of the competition, Max Andersen, whose monument was erected, amid many protests from the official partitioners in the competition. Andersen’s monument had a more peaceful, dignified imagery: A nun calmly shields a boy of about four and a slightly older girl. The nun’s gaze is directed towards the children, while the children look towards the sky. According to Ahlmann’s book, the two children were modelled after two siblings, kindergartener Dennis and schoolgirl Ayoe, of whom only Dennis survived the bombardment. In the tiles surrounding the monument, the names and ages of the deceased are engraved.

The monument at Frederiksberg Allé, Copenhagen

I think the monument is a moving and quite tasteful way of commemorating the victims. I like that the monument depicts a surviving child, as well as a child who was killed, and that a special tribute is paid to the nuns: Several reports by both surviving school children and firefighters show that the nuns were infinitely unselfish and brave in their attempt to save the children, many of them perishing while shielding a child from falling rubble.

The monument is not, however, immediately noticable and, perhaps because of its calm, dignified expression, it blends in almost too well on the picturesque boulevard, Frederiksberg Allé, where it stands erected. Indeed, in 1993 journalist Albert Müller wrote an opinion piece in national newspaper B.T. in which he complained that the monument seemed forgotten and unnoticed by the public. Was the monument not grand enough a gesture? It’s hard to say of course. I can see how an entire memorial garden dedicated to the French School might have been too much. Not because I don’t think the victims deserved to be remembered, but because it would have been like a burial ground, a constant reminder of this specific, horrible incident, and the concrete, lost little bodies. What I do think could perhas have been an appropriate way of commemorating the loss was to build a memorial garden on the ground of the French School, dedicated not just to the victims of the French School bombardment, but to every Danish victim of World War II. To move towards ridding the incident finally of its atmosphere of the fragmentary and meaningless. To include all those seemingly insignificant objects in a context. To let the incident speak of the unavoidably cruelty of a war that might otherwise be remembered as something our nation got through unharmed.

Of course I’m writing this with the luxury of being neither part of the necessarily pragmatic city administration, nor a grieving relative of a victim, and my perspective is naturally limited. But I’m writing it in my capacity as a person who thinks it is crucial that we remember.

(This essay has been difficult for me to write as I am keenly aware of the sensitive subject matter. Many of the survivors are still alive today, as well as others whose lives are immediately affected by the catastrophe. I have strived to be respectful of the victims and towards getting all the facts concerning the bombing straight. If I have in any way failed to do so, please let me know and I will take steps to correct it.)

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