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MY GOOD FRIEND CHRIS

Chris was born on April 11th 1920 in Copenhagen. The flat was situated in a side street off Østerbrogade.  His mother, Anna Kjøller, was from Rønne in Bornholm, where her father, Niels Kjøller, was a fisherman and known as a pioneer. He was said to be the first man in Rønne to have a motor installed in his boat. He was chairman of the cooperative Herring and Eel Smokehouse. He was also first mate on the lifeboat in Rønne, which at the time did not have a motor but was rowed by the rescuers. 149 people were saved by this boat and for this deed Niels Kjøller was appointed ‘Man of the Dannebrog’. Chris’s father, Viggo Georg Herman Christian Christensen, was a Copenhagener whilst his father was from Jutland. The grandfather worked at the Carlsberg Brewery and he was a very strong man. When his wife, Chris’s grandmother, had become a widow, Chris had to go and get her pension at the brewery and he was very proud to overhear his grandfather’s work mates talk about the strong man from whom he had got his family name ‘Christensen’.
Georg Christensen was a strapping fellow too and the day after he had finished serving his apprenticeship as a bookbinder, he went travelling as a ‘Naver’; (having served their apprenticeship young Scandinavians (Navers) at that time often went travelling on foot all over the Continent before eventually settling down). He could tell tales about the many different kinds of work he had done during his travels in Germany; the toughest of them all must have been as a dock worker in Hamburg, especially when the cargo consisted of heavy sacks of salt.
He continued on foot down through Germany and went to Italy where in 1912 he reported for duty in the War in Tunisia; later on in life he would say very little about this period. However, he hinted that the Italian soldiers had been very nervous – particularly at night – because the Tunisians often succeeded in sneaking up on their enemies in the trenches and cutting their throats.
When World War I started in 1914 he managed to get back to Denmark where he was called up. As a soldier he met the girl from Rønne who became his wife and remained so for the rest of his life. Their first daughter, Johanne, was born in 1917, the son Søren (in this book Chris, see Preface) in 1920, and the third child, Annelise, in 1921.
Although he himself preferred the name Viggo, his wife always called him Georg. He was the kind of man who did not like routine and did not care for a permanent job. He provided for his family by working as a travelling salesman selling various goods which he and his wife had made themselves. Chris’s mother was very good at crocheting and sewing and Georg was quite a genius with his hands but he quickly grew tired of producing the same product over and over again. He loved his wife dearly and probably also his children; however he was of the old school so he thought his wife and children were his property and had to obey him and think along his lines. Clichés like ‘big boys don’t cry’, or ‘children should be seen and not heard,’ were his normal repertoire. He said that he had always been among the five best pupils in school and he expected no less from his children. If they did not obey him, he could be extremely strict and a sound beating was not a rare thing. Neither were harsh words or even prohibitions to go out. Chris would never forget the three months during which he was not allowed to go out and play with his friends. The reason for this was that he had dropped from being number three or four in class to being number fourteen! As a consequence the children were afraid of their father and out of his strictness grew the first seeds of their assertiveness and their desire to become personally independent of him.
As Georg was not interested in money he only kept working as long as was necessary to make sure that the family could get food on the table every day. Even though the food was quite spartan, it was wholesome and this was probably why the children were rarely sick neither as infants nor later on.
Their mother was the children’s saint. She was always sweet, mild, and reassuring. Because of her illness she never protested against her husband in the children’s presence; however, she often made him change his mind so that he would go from a big ‘NO’ to a ‘yes’ in the children’s favour.

 

CHILDHOOD

Chris’s earliest memories date from when he was three or four years old.  He lived in a small wooden house somewhere in Amager and was mostly alone with his sister Johanne.  His father went up to Copenhagen in the morning and came back in the evening with food – mostly bread, potatoes, tomatoes and cheese.  During this time his mother was in hospital as she was seriously ill with tuberculosis.
His sister, who was three years older, was like a mother to him.    She washed him and cooked his meals, as well as doing many other things. She also milked a goat, which provided them with milk and the goat followed after the children like a dog. He remembers visiting his mother in hospital and also that he was allowed to ride on his father’s back. His mother had such a high temperature that the doctors would not start a ‘light treatment’. Much later she admitted she had manipulated the thermometer so it did not show her real temperature because, she said, “I wanted treatment so I could go home to my children.”
As winter approached, Chris and his sister were put in a children’s home. The only memory he has of this place is being twice put into a darkened room. This  was a  punishment given by the staff because he had bitten another boy’s finger till it bled because the other boy had taken his place in the queue for a new swing. The second time was when he stood naked at the window of the bathroom so that his bare tummy was visible. The nurse probably assumed that here was a future exhibitionist! While Chris and Johanne were at the children’s home, Annelise, the youngest sister, was left with her maternal grandfather and their oldest aunt in Rønne.
After two years in hospital, the mother was discharged with only one good lung. This meant she had difficulties breathing and was unable to do much of the housework, especially cleaning the stairs and even the cooking was difficult for her. Here again Johanne was a great help and their father cooked most of their meals. When Chris turned six, he was given specific chores to do such as  polishing the shoes and fetching coal from the cellar. Just before his mother was discharged from hospital, the family  moved into a two-room flat with a stove in Lundtoftegade, Nørrebro.
At this age Chris started school although he was a year younger than most of his class mates. Like Chris, Annelise went to  Hillerødgade School in Nørrebro. Chris was pleased that his little sister had come home from their grandfather’s house because then he could act the big brother, which wasn’t that simple as they didn’t both agree on Chris’s role. They both did well in school: four years’ primary and five years’ secondary school; they even managed a one-year voluntary Latin course.
Chris passed his A-levels at Efterslægtens Gymnasium (upper secondary school) while Annelise passed hers at Rysensteens Gymnasium. Annelise had all A’s and Chris had all B’s in modern languages: Anne-lise was a very thorough student while Chris was rather superficial and wanted to do too many things at the same time. Johanne, who supported her mother and the rest of the family at home, left school after the seven years which were compulsory in those days.
During the school years the family lived on a tight budget due, in particular, to the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, which influenced all Europe. It had become difficult to sell the home-made products they were still producing. At the time it was actually quite normal to send one’s children out to work but their father wouldn’t do that although it would have increased the family’s income considerably: he was proud of his ‘studious children’.
During his primary school years, Chris  earned small amounts of money by running shopping errands for elderly people in the block. Being very good at playing marbles, he won a lot of marbles from other boys whereupon he resold them at a price lower than the cost price. At the age of fifteen he was working half the summer holidays: at first as a delivery boy and a cleaner in a butcher’s shop and the following year at a grocer’s shop where he was also responsible for keeping things tidy in the basement and for organising returned bottles.
As a 17-year old he was a milk boy at Enigheden Dairy and had to begin work at five o’clock in the morning. Together with a mate he had to help the milkman load the milk float and afterwards they could sit with the milkman, who was in charge of the horses, right from Nørrebro to Sønder Boulevard in Vesterbro, which was a pretty long ride. On the way, the two boys had to deliver all the milk bottles to the customers as fast as possible. One morning one of his schoolmates happened to see Chris on top of the milk float; after that day his nickname was always ‘the milk boy’ but strangely enough he was quite proud of that name.
In those days, working class children called rich people’s children ‘father’s sons’ and ‘stuck-up so and so.’ In return, the rich boys would call the working class children ‘proletarians’. According to this scale the fourteen students of the class could be divided into twelve stuck-up so and so and two proletarians. Living in fairly straitened circumstances, Chris was certainly the poorer of the two.
He had got the impression  that the Social Democratic Party was doing their best to improve poor people’s circumstances so he joined the party’s local youth branch (the Lygten branch), which had its office in a wooden hut on the corner of Hillerødgade and Lundtoftegade. Actually he was too young to be a member but pretended to be eighteen years old. He quickly became a group leader in the DUI, which was a children’s branch of the DSU. His tasks were much like the ones carried out by a scout leader, i.e. to teach the children to look after themselves when out in the countryside, to be obedient, to behave and speak decently, to be on their guard against alcohol and tobacco; they were also warned against the dangers of too early sex and the risk of getting venereal diseases.
As he was not even sixteen years old Chris was hardly a very competent teacher of these subjects but being already then a frequent customer at the local library in Stefansgade he found solid theoretical support in books. Unlike in the scouts, the slightly older DUI children had to be prepared for joining the DSU later on and they had to learn about the political aims of the party. In the election campaign in 1936 Chris  helped to hang up posters and to supervise the DUI’s choir, which visited most of the Nørrebro area. They sang the selected election campaign song ‘Stauning again’.
Chris became quite popular in the DSU when he managed to arrange a debate in the DSU hut between two very well-known politicians. They were both good speakers and debaters. The Danes liked them as they were both quite outspoken and cheerful. Besides they did not use empty phrases. One of them was Aksel Larsen, leader of the Communist Party and the other one was Bovbjerg, called ‘the blacksmith’, who was a Social Democratic minister. It was probably the very first time two well-known politicians had been persuaded to have a discussion in a small DSU branch.
One of the leaders of the Workers’ Adult Education Association became interested in Chris and having got to know about his wish to study law, he offered him a job in the WAEA during his period of study. However, Chris was not interested – at first because if he accepted the job he would have to admit to having lied about his age, but also because he had become quite disappointed at the way most political leaders were putting themselves first and kept manipulating others in order to gain increased influence. He was also disappointed that most of the members let themselves be lead like sheep.

 

GERMANY

In the summer of 1937, Chris and his class mate Franklin – the other proletarian – cycled all the way to Germany. At the time they could change one Danish Krone for a Reichsmark. It was legal to change up to a maximum of 30 Mark. Chris had fallen for the well organized propaganda of the Nazi regime: jobs for everybody, motorways, order, etc. However, after the second day in Germany he was noticing things he did not like at all. Chris and his friend were spending the night in one of the many youth hostels established to enable Hitler-Jugend youngsters and tourists to learn about the new Germany without having to pay a lot of money. The price for one night was 30 Groschen. This particular hostel had an old people’s home at the other end of the building and whereas the youth hostel had central heating and showers and was in very good condition, the elderly people had none of these amenities. They had to leave the building to get water, they had an old-fashioned privy and their living quarters were in very poor condition.
Chris and Franklin spent the next night in Hamburg Harbour on board a large ship called ‘Heingutenwind’, which had been converted into a youth hostel. In the morning, Franklin sat down at the piano in the dining hall and started to play ‘Stormy Weather’, one of the most popular jazz tunes in Europe. He was stopped before long and he and Chris were asked to leave the place: decadent music was not to be played in Germany!
When the two cyclists went on the famous boat trip on the Rhine, all the passengers had a small song book and there was a lot of singing down the river. When passing the Lorelei Rock everybody was singing Heine’s poem to Lorelei and the two Danes were surprised that it was permitted to sing a song written by a Jew; then they noticed that underneath the text it said, ‘unknown writer’. In ‘all innocence’ they tried to ask two different Germans about the name of the writer of that beautiful song, and in both cases they were told that the songwriter was unknown. One of the two Germans did not look at the Danes when answering. Otherwise they had a good holiday and by travelling together with members of Hitler Jugend they managed to save some of their pocket money. The young Germans turned out to be quite friendly and invited the Danes to a military barracks and offered them a good  free meal for dinner. What the Danes did not like, however, was that they had to raise one arm and say ‘Heil Hitler’. They found a way to partly avoid saying the words by quickly mumbling ‘Heilt er’ (heilen means to heal). In spite of the limited accommodation expenses and several barracks dinners they had  very little money left when they reached Heidelberg.
The 1000-kilometre ride back to Denmark was accomplished in five days. There were no more free dinners and they lived on bread dipped in milk and some soup in the evening. They were both quite satisfied with their German holiday and felt in excellent form. When Chris’s mother saw him again, however, she was quite shocked and cried, “You look terrible! Have you had no food at all?”
The trip had given them the opportunity to see a beautiful country and to meet some nice people. But they had also got a feeling that Nazism was dangerous to the people of Germany, who were manipulated with false propaganda and had been deprived of their right to freedom of consciousness.

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