“I was insanely shocked.”
Her voice is almost gone. But the words need yet clearly through the phone. The words she uses when she has to describe what the impression, the day did on her. The day when Denmark was occupied.
It is most people today can remember it. But 102-year-old Lise Nørgaard can. For the 9. april 1940 is one of the days, that has never been in her glemmebog.
the Shock, she is talking about, was the sight that met her when she as a young journalist in the course of the day arrived at Copenhagen with his notepad.
But the harsh memories of the 9. april started early in the morning.
Lise Nørgaard was a journalist at Roskilde Dagblad. She was married to Mogens Flindt Nielsen, and the pair lived in a property in the midtsjællandske town. Anyway, this morning they were abruptly woken up.
“We lay sleeping, as our concierge – such a one had at the time – in the house came running in, she had the key to our apartment,” says Lise Nørgaard and continues:
“‘the Germans are upon us’, she cried. ‘What a nonsense’, we said.”
“But I swung me out of bed in my nightgown, put on my rubber boots and a raincoat on, and so I ran to the Hersegade to the Roskilde Newspaper where I worked.”
It was not without reason, that the only 22-year-old Lise Nørgaard was in a hurry to get in on the editors. And, not least, his office.
“There I had a big jumping jack, as imagined by Hitler. It could both jerk with his legs and salute like Hitler,” she tells about her papfigur, which had contributed to much amusement in the office, but now suddenly was explosive to have hanging.
“the Editor lived on the second floor, and on the way to the editors I met him on the stairs, as he came rushing down. And then we cried both ‘Hitler’.”
“We knew both that the germans would soon come around on the editorial. And they did,” says Lise Nørgaard, who reached the that the pill sprællemanden down.
“I ran home with it and threw it into the boiler. And I have regretted ever since. I would have liked to today.”
Even though she was shocked by the German occupation of Denmark, had she and many other long anet, that it was that way, and the wind blew.
A feeling that was only reinforced when she two years earlier on their honeymoon in Germany, where the newlyweds also visited family in Hamburg.
“There could be good sense that it would happen,” says Lise Nørgaard.
9. april 1940 it happened. Although Denmark and Germany the year before had signed a ‘non aggression’, crossed the German soldiers at. 4.15 that morning the Danish border and went to war. Two hours later Denmark had surrendered. The country was occupied.
After burning the explosive jumping jack ran Lise Nørgaard back in the apartment, pulled regnfrakken, rubber boots and nightgown of. Donned their clothes, and ran back in the office, where she immediately volunteered to report from the day.
“So I took the train into Copenhagen to see what was going on,” she says.
Here she saw the German soldiers march into the square between the silent locals on the way to work.
She saw the matrons, who mischievously waved to the soldiers from their windows. So them even bring them coffee.
‘This experience came to overshadow all of today’s other depressing impression,’ she wrote in his memoirs about the day, when Denmark was occupied.
“of Course I remember 9. april. I was insanely shocked,” says Lise Nørgaard.
