The Rower

A story about karma

Knud Christiansen was not a big thinker or a personin the news. Still, I feel confident in saying thathe was one of the greatest men or women I have beenlucky enough to meet—and arguably, in terms of hispersonal impact on the lives of others, one of thegreatest men of the 20th century, which awarded itshighest accolades of fame and power to people whocaused unaccountable destruction and suffering. Oursole encounter, which took place in either 1983 or1984 in a clock repair store located on the cornerof Lexington Avenue and 61st Street in Manhattan,may have lasted as long as 15 minutes, though it wasprobably shorter. I remember it was raining outside,which is why I took shelter in his shop.

To combat the tedium of my high school years, in the1980s I had adopted the habit of time travel,whether via paintings in museums or novels andhistory books, which transported me to places farbeyond the boringly familiar if not yet entirelymanicured confines of the Upper East Side. The manbehind the counter, with a long white beard, in adark woolen watch cap, reminded me of an old sea dogin a Patrick O’Brian novel. He was smoking a pipe,and the smell of his tobacco in the closed spacewith the sound of the rain beating down against theplate glass window remains as vivid to me as theimage of the man himself. The smoke from his pipeseemed to symbolize the passing of time, curling uptoward the ceiling in front of a wall of brokenclocks of all shapes and sizes, most with tagshanging down from one part or another to indicatethe name of the owner and the nature of the repairthat was needed. Given the significance ofclockmaker iconography in 17th- and 18th-centuryEuropean painting and thought with which I wasfamiliar (my high school girlfriend worked at theMet), it is not surprising that this image remainedfixed in my head as a kind of homespun illustrationof the idea of God.

Knud Christiansen couldn’t actually make clocks. Hecould only fix them, and, as it turned out, eventhat talent was intermingled with a good-naturedproclivity for the con. Yet the karmic wheel thathis life set in motion, which my visit to his shopallowed me to glimpse through a keyhole onlybriefly, and which would become clear to me manyyears later, suggests that my youthful perceptionwas perhaps not entirely wrong.

The hinge upon which my understanding of KnudChristiansen’s life turned was a device of the typethat Alfred Hitchcock referred to as a “MacGuffin,”i.e. the random object or event that sets a largerplot in motion. The MacGuffin here was a winning$300 million Powerball lottery ticket that wascashed in 2002 in a remote county of West Virginiaby a man named Jack Whittaker, known to his friendsand family as Big Daddy. Despite being the largestsingle jackpot winner in American history up untilthat time, Big Daddy had refused to be interviewed.I convinced him otherwise by driving up and down thelocal highways until I spotted what I correctlysurmised was the only gold-plated Hummer in thecounty, which was registered to Jack Whittaker.Spotting Big Daddy behind the wheel, I pursued himat varying speeds until he pulled into a conveniencestore parking lot, and, after entering the store andtalking for a while with the cashier, agreed to giveme an interview. My account of the serial tragediesthat had blighted his life since he cashed hiswinning Powerball ticket led to a phone call from aman from New Jersey who complimented my article, andoffered that he was working on a screenplay aboutBig Daddy’s life and downfall for which my inputmight be useful. Flattered, I agreed to meet him forcoffee near an office I kept in the Flower District.

As it turned out, the screenwriter was in hiseighties, and had not had a screenplay produced in40 years. Nor had he ever met Big Daddy in person,even though he talked to him on the phone at leastonce a week. At the end of our meeting, he gave me ascreenplay to read—a Holocaust revengefantasy he had authored years earlier, about aninmate of a Nazi concentration camp brothel whoseeks revenge on her tormentors after the war.

Oddly, despite its comic-book framing and hopelesslyexploitative B-movie subject matter, or perhapsbecause of those things, I thought the screenplaywas funny, and also strangely moving. So I sent itto my agent in Los Angeles in the hope that shewould hate it, and I would thereby get thescreenwriter, or would-be screenwriter—who inaddition to being over 80 years old had a pronouncedhunchback, which by itself seemed likely to ensurethat any future pitch meetings would end incalamity—out of my hair.

The script went nowhere, but the screenwriter wasgrateful for my help. He wanted to thank me, hesaid, by bequeathing a story he had hoped to writehimself for many years, but which he doubted hewould ever have time to finish, or even properlybegin. It was a true story, my guest continued,about a member of the 1936 Danish Olympic rowingteam who began rowing Jews to Sweden—a personal actof incredible bravery and daring that led directlyto the seaborne rescue of nearly the entire DanishJewish community from the Nazis. If nothing else, heslyly suggested, it would make a great movie. MaybeSteven Spielberg would direct it.

Touched by his optimism, yet eager to flee (thenormal response of any writer when presented withsuch gifts being a sincere “thank you” followed by aspeedy exit), I suggested, gently, that there was noshortage of Hollywood movies about the Holocaust,beginning with Spielberg’s ownSchindler’s List. The hunchback seemeddisappointed, but only for a moment. The rower, hecontinued, had also helped bring Tibetan Buddhism toAmerica, and smoked salmon to Zabar’s. Maybe thoseadventures could also be subjects for a movie. By mycalculations, I had maybe another three minutes toget this man out of my life, before the glint in hiseye triggered something in me that might lead usboth down the road to God knows where.

“So,” I asked him, while beckoning for the check,“is this rower still alive?”

“Maybe,” he answered. “I’m not sure.”

“He’s in Denmark?” I countered. Surely, the AtlanticOcean would be wide enough to protect me from anyfurther engagement.

“Oh, he hasn’t been to Denmark for many years,” thehunchback answered airily. “He used to go swimmingat the JCC on the Upper West Side, about 20 blocksfrom here. But he’s not been well.”

“That’s too bad,” I answered, with relief.

The hunchback looked downcast. Then he perked up. “Ithink I might have his daughter’s email addresssomewhere,” he suggested.

“Great, send it to me when you find it,” I replied,as I started to get up from the table.

Then, with only a hair’s breadth separating me froma clean escape, I felt an invisible hand tugging onmy coat. “What else did he do in New York besidesselling lox to Zabar’s?” I asked.

“Oh, lots of things,” the hunchback answered. “Forone, he had a shop on Lexington Avenue for manyyears, where he fixed clocks.”

***

When I met Marianne Marstrand in her apartment onthe Upper East Side of Manhattan, about 15 blocksaway from where I went to high school, and 30 blocksfrom her father’s old clock shop, she told me thather father Knud had died a month earlier and wastherefore not available for interviews and had leftno oral history or other personal account of hislife. I accepted a sheaf of papers and artifacts sheoffered for my perusal, including a copy of herfather’s commendation from Yad Vashem, whichconfirmed that Knud Christiansen had been judged tobe among the 27,921 Righteous Gentiles who riskedtheir lives to save Jews from the Holocaust, and amini-cassette recording of a speech by an Israelidiplomat at a ceremony honoring Knud. When I finallylocated a mini-cassette player at the bottom of anold duffel bag filled with magazine fact-checkingmaterials from 20 years ago, when mini-cassettes,fact-checking, and magazines were all still invogue, I found that the diplomat’s remarks weremostly inaudible.

Which is where the story might well have ended, ifnot for one final coincidence. While completing aseries of portraits of the proprietors ofManhattan’s vanishing one-man shops in the late1990s, a painter named Max Ferguson had glimpsedKnud Christiansen in the window of the same clockshop on Lexington Avenue where I had seen himperhaps 15 years earlier. Being in the business ofpainting eccentric small businessmen in Manhattan,and perhaps also affected by the same 17th-centurymotifs of clocks and the passage of time that hadpreviously attracted my attention, he decided topaint Knud’s portrait—though he did not undertakethe painting until late 2005, completing the work in2006.

Ferguson knew nothing about Knud’s life in Denmarkor involvement with rescuing Jews or TibetanBuddhists. Yet the painting itself is oddlysuggestive, with its overlapping clocks and cleverdistortions contrasting with the perfectly drawn,nearly Japanese wisps of smoke rising up from thebowl of Knud’s pipe. The back of the canvas, which Iviewed last month at its home in the Crystal BridgesMuseum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas,gives almost the opposite impression, with thepainter’s mastery of 17th-century portrait techniquereplaced by a teenager’s jumpy notebook scrawl, withrandom-seeming quotations about time (“When you killtime, you murder success” – the motto of StiffRecords, 1980; “will the person who keeps giving myclock amphetamines please cut it out”) interspersedwith newspaper clippings about recent atrocitiescommitted against Jews, such as the torture-murderof Ilan Halimi in Paris, as well as Olympianart-world jokes about the painting itself (“Cecin’est pas une pipe – RM”). He titled the painting“Time,” adding a half-plaintive joke on the back:“It is somehow fitting that this painting, with itstheme of time, took me longer to do (six months)than any other.”

Ferguson is an odd duck, who is possessed of anotherworldly talent for realist portraiture that, ina different era, and I am not exaggerating histalent by much, might have earned him a seat at thesame table with Rembrandt and Vermeer, back when theability to capture wood grain and fine finishes inoil on a two-dimensional canvas was an attainmentmuch sought-after by princes and wealthy merchants.Max also painted a rather eerie portrait of IrvingChais, the proprietor of the famous New York DollHospital, which was located on Lexington Avenuediagonally opposite Knud’s clock shop. Chais, who inperson was soft-spoken and kind, spent his liferepairing children’s dolls on the Upper East Sideafter helping liberate the Dachau concentration campas a young GI.

The two men were probably fated to be neighbors, Isuggested to Max, who divides his time these daysbetween New York and Jerusalem.

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

I told him what I had been told so far of Knud’slife. Knud Christiansen had become an alternateoarsman for the Danish national rowing team in the1936 Olympics in Berlin in order to visit hisgirlfriend Karen, whose parents disapproved of Knudbecause he grew up above a chocolate shop. In orderto end their daughter’s unsuitable liaison, theysent her away to live with a Jewish family they metat a hotel on the Danish coast who happened to ownone of Berlin’s most famous department stores, withthe intention that Karen would study cooking. It wasa particularly fateful and disastrous choice, onethat alerted Karen and then Knud to the evils of theNazi regime. Though no one seemed particularlyinterested in the teenagers’ perceptions of Nazievil upon their return to Denmark, Knud and Karendid succeed in getting married. After the Nazisinvaded Denmark, Knud and Karen became leadingfigures in the Danish underground, and each foughtthe Nazis—often not knowing anything about theother’s work—until the end of the war.

The way Knud helped save the Jews of Denmark wasalso more or less an accident. Knud had a workshopby the docks in Copenhagen, where he made skibindings and motorcycle helmets and other leathergoods. One day, a large ship arrived in Copenhagenfrom Germany, curiously bearing no cargo; when heinquired about the nature of the ship’s business, hewas told that the return cargo would be Denmark’sJewish population. As it turned out, a register ofCopenhagen’s Jewish families had recently been takenfrom a local synagogue. Putting these two pieces ofinformation together, Knud and Karen’s cell set outto warn Copenhagen’s Jews to stay away from theirhomes to avoid the coming roundup. Knud and Karenhid hunted Jews in their apartment, and thensecretly ferried them northward to Karen’s father’scountry house on the coast. From there, Knud beganrowing their guests one by one to safety in Sweden.

Knud’s life was a living example of howhuman goodness can reverberate through thecosmos.

When the war was over, Knud found himself targetedby the Copenhagen police, who had served the Nazis,and couldn’t abide the thought of a man who hadflouted the law by hiding Jews, robbing banks, andengaging in other resistance activities, which alsoincluded the execution of Danish collaborators. TheChristiansen family then left Denmark and becamegypsies, moving from place to place in the family’sVW van.

At one of their stops, in the South of France nearthe town of Les Eyzies, they became neighbors of aflamboyant eccentric named Bernard Benson, who hadinvented guidance systems for early intercontinentalballistic missiles in California and drove hisRolls-Royce barefoot and had recently purchased achateau in the Dordogne, where he housed many of themost prominent teachers of Tibetan Buddhism who hadfled the Chinese Communist assault on their country.Knud and his family then helped the Tibetans toestablish themselves in America, where one of Knud’sdaughters met and married a Canadian oil and miningmagnate named Maurice Strong. Partly as a result ofthe family’s varied influences, Strong became thefather of the 1972 Stockholm Conference, which beganthe climate change movement. Knud’s grandchildren,in turn, included members of what are arguably threeof the world’s most important contemporarydiasporas: Tibetans, Jews, and African Americans.

If what I had been told were true, I told Max,Knud’s life was a living example of how humangoodness can reverberate through the cosmos throughthe webs of causes and effects in which we arealways and inalterably enmeshed, and whichconstitute our reality. Or, to put it in Buddhistterms, Knud’s life was an illustration of the powerof karma, a word whose root in Sanskrit includes theverbs do, make, perform,accomplish, cause,effect, prepare, andundertake.

“Well,” Max noted, when I was done. “I guess youdon’t have much choice but to write it.”

Some facts about the rower’s life are more or lessverifiable.

As a boy, Knud Christiansen indeed grew up above afamous chocolate shop in Copenhagen, which I havevisited (the chocolates are excellent). The shop wasrun by his mother, Alida, who got her start in thechocolate business—this part gets fuzzier—when arelative in St. Petersburg, who may technically havebeen the husband of a relative or the husband’sbrother, escaped with the chocolate recipes from theCzar’s kitchen during the Revolution. Arriving inCopenhagen just after a cholera epidemic killedKnud’s father, he gave the young widow the recipesthat rescued her and her family from poverty. By thetime Knud was nine, Alida was regularly deliveringsweets from the shop to the King and Queen ofDenmark, who lived just around the corner.

Alida was a redhead who drove a red convertiblethrough the streets of Denmark and was rumored tohave caught the eye of King Christian himself. Shewas by all accounts a beauty and a charmer, and Knudwas the favorite of her five children. When Knud’sdaughter Hanne asked him about his first memory ofhis mother, he remembered being two or three yearsold, and trying to dress himself in his sailor suit,and putting on the pants backward. “She was upagainst the window, and the sun was coming inthrough the window hitting her hair,” Hanne told me.“When she saw him putting his pants on the wrongway, she just broke out in laughter.”

On her way to school, Hanne would often stop by hergrandmother’s shop and fill her pockets withmarzipan and nougat, and bars of dark chocolate,which contained barely any sugar. “She was first ofall very beautiful, and extremely generous,” Hannetold me of her grandmother. “I have never metanybody that had that kind of generosity. And shepassed it to him.”

While accounts of a mother’s beauty that drew theyouthful attentions of a king can in most cases bedismissed as fairy tales, they were confirmed for mein this case by a photo album that Marianne andHanne’s brother Peter gave me during a visit toCopenhagen. In it, I was startled to find aphotograph of a woman who looked like a young GretaGarbo, who spent time in Copenhagen at the beginningof her movie career. Except, according to Peter, thewoman in the photograph was actually Alida in middleage, shortly after the birth of her firstgrandchild, Jytte.

Knud’s father never glimpsed his wife’s great beautyeven once, having gone blind at the age of 18,before they met. According to Knud’s youngest sisterTove, their father was a tall and handsomeadventurer who spoke many languages, did complexmathematical sums in his head, and dressed well. Nowin her late eighties, Tove retains a vivid memory ofthe day her father died. “We stood five children allaround, mother and five children. At the moment ofdeath, he said he heard music. He said something toeach of us. Knud was to look after the otherchildren, Jorgen was not supposed to play with thetailor’s sons, they were naughty,” she said. Tove’sparticular instruction was to help her mother. “Evenif she toiled all night, and up early to send us offto school early in the morning,” she remembers. “Shewould be there in the morning ironing her clotheswith her feet standing in a pan of hot water.”

Karen Rasmussen, Knud’s future wife and partner inresistance activities, had no magical or tragicchildhood memories of her parents. She was thedaughter of the royal physician Holger Rasmussen andhis wife, Elva, though she was too shy and stubbornto spend much time at Court. The great love of herlife was Knud Christiansen, who was in her brother’sclass in school. “She was head over heels in lovewith him,” her daughter Hanne recalled. “He was justgorgeous. So physically gorgeous. He was exciting.He was just a person that had charisma and he hadgreat compassion. Any woman would fall in love withthat guy.”

Tove, his sister, has similar memories, though theycenter on a different quality of Knud’s. “The bestthing about Knud was that he was modest andunselfish,” she recalled. “He never spoke about goodthings he did. We always found out from his friends.He did not care about money or worldly things.”

Elva Rasmussen did not approve of her eldestdaughter’s feelings for the boy who lived above achocolate shop. Early in the interwar summer of1936, on the terrace of a resort hotel on the coastof Denmark, she and her husband met another couplefrom the upper echelons of European society who werealso anxious about their child’s future. Just as theRasmussens worried about Karen’s inappropriateliaison, the Fortentaub family of Berlin, if Karen’slater-life memory was correct, were concerned aboutthe future of their eldest son, who wished to becomea lawyer like his father, though the Nuremberg racelaws, which had been passed by the Reichstag theprevious fall, barred Jews from any access to highereducation. While the Fortentaubs surely hoped thatNazi Party leader Adolf Hitler’s outlandish racistdiatribes might be tempered by the soberingresponsibilities of real political power, they werenonetheless concerned about their son’s prospects ina country whose wobbly democracy had been hijackedby a Jew-hating would-be dictator. As the heirs toone of Berlin’s most fashionable department stores,they feared that the wealth and social positiontheir family had earned over generations in Germanywas in peril.

That afternoon, or evening, the two families, whohad only just met, decided on a plan that might easeeach of their most pressing concerns in a singlestroke: They would swap children. The Fortentaubs’son would come to live with the Rasmussens inCopenhagen and study law, while Karen would go livewith the Fortentaubs at their palatial apartment inBerlin, where she would take a two-year course at aworld-famous cooking school, the Lettestein. Inaddition to teaching her to cook, her absence fromCopenhagen would also serve the purpose of puttingher questionable suitor, Knud Christiansen, onice—or so her mother hoped.

Life in Berlin with a Jewish family whose businessand home were being targeted daily by Nazi violencecame as a shock to Karen. “The Jews were shifted toconcentration camps, and day after day their shopswere looted and burned,” she remembered later inlife. “People did not dare go out at night. They hada guard sitting down in the lobby checking everyonein and out. He knew what everyone in that house wasdoing, who was visiting whom, what they broughthome,” she remembered. “Everybody tried to get theirchildren out, buying tickets to South America,Japan, Australia.”

Back home, Karen’s descriptions of the terror andchaos of Jewish life in Berlin in the late 1930sstruck her parents as most likely the wildexaggerations of a sensitive teenage mind. “No onebelieved me,” she recalled.

Karen’s mother’s plan to separate her daughter fromher young suitor was unsuccessful, as Karen returnedto Denmark with her feelings for Knud unaffected bytheir time apart. Still, Karen did fulfill one ofher mother’s ambitions by marrying Knud at theTrinity Church, which was built by the Danish royalfamily. “It was stunning,” Tove recalled. “CrownPrince Frederick of Denmark [the present Queen’sfather] was in attendance, as well as naval officerswith their hats and regalia.” In honor of hisdaughter’s wedding, the royal physician and theCrown Prince played piano together for the guests.

Following the wedding, Knud set up a leatherworkshop in a less regal location near the docks, onStudiestraede. “The people who supplied the leatherwere Jewish,” Knud’s daughter Marianne explained.“So that was sort of his connection to the Jewishcommunity in Denmark.” He joined the local rowingclub, which helped him keep in shape. “He would rowaround the whole of Copenhagen,” Marianneremembered. “It would take days to do it.”

Though the young couple was perhaps at first glancenot a natural match, they complemented each otherwell. Where Knud was open, humble, outgoing, andathletic, Karen was bookish and reserved. At thesame time, she was also a champion swimmer andsharpshooter. “Above all, she had this acute insightinto people,” her daughter Marianne recalled. “Sheused to tell my sister, ‘Be careful about this guy.He’s not what he says he is. Watch this one.’”

The German invasion of Denmark on April 9, 1940,became known to Danes as the Six Hour War. In fact,Denmark formally surrendered to the Nazi armies inless than two hours, but due to communicationsissues some units continued to fight for a few hourslonger. As the German soldiers disembarked on thedocks of Copenhagen, a Jewish doctor named Hein, aclose friend of the Christiansen family, shothimself. His wife was already dead, and he had nosurviving family left. “For him, it was clear thatit was over for the Jews and he did not want be apart of it,” Tove remembered.

In later interviews, Karen remembered the Nazitakeover of Denmark as both ludicrous and shameful.“It was ridiculous,” she remembered. “The Germanswent down and took the harbor and took the ships in.They went down and took the Commandant in his bedand marched him off. It was a disgrace.” Though theCopenhagen harbor was heavily mined, the Germanstook the harbor and the city without losing a man orfiring a shot—suggesting that the Nazi invasion hadbeen choreographed with the help of at least somehigher-level members of the Danish military andpolitical classes.

Outside Copenhagen, I located the only living borderguard who witnessed the Nazi invasion. A novelistnamed Sven, he was 98 years old when I met him andliving in an old-age home, which was predictablyoutfitted in classic Danish mid-century modernfurniture. Lying in bed, with pale, nearlytranslucent skin and deep blue eyes, he rememberedthe German invasion of Denmark with surprisingclarity.

“I opened the window and saw that a friend of minefrom the royal army and his soldiers were shootingwith machine guns,” he remembered. “So, I went ontothe street and said, ‘What in hell are you doinghere?’ ‘Oh, some Germans are shooting on us,’” herecalls. “So, I peered around the corner and then asergeant took me and pulled me back and at the sametime, there was shooting. I should have been Swisscheese.”

As the commander of the royal guard, Sven reporteddirectly to the king himself. “King Christian andhis wife sat there, and he was stunned. He said tome, ‘What do you want, lieutenant?’ So I said, ‘YourMajesty, I want to fight the last half hour.’” KingChristian’s response was unequivocal. “‘Lieutenant,there will be no fight. Denmark has surrendered.’”

For both himself and for his king, Sven remembers,the German invasion came as a profound, otherworldlyshock. “We didn’t dream of it,” he answered.Immediately, he says, he joined the resistance,where he commanded a unit of professional soldierswhose job would be to attack the Germans from therear when the Allies invaded. His best friend fromchildhood became the Resistance executioner known asThe Flame. “Many were taken by the Germans andtortured,” he remembered. “They tortured them interrible ways.”

When our discussion turned to the fate of Denmark’sJews, he told me something I had already heard manytimes from men and women who were alive during thewar, but which I had not fully absorbed until nowbecause of its strangeness. “We considered them alllike ordinary Danes,” he said, with a shrug.

When I pressed him and his friend Marie, who wasalso visiting, and whose father, like Sven, was alsoa noted resistance commander, to tell me what theyknew about Jews, they explained that in Sweden, Naziideology did gain a foothold, because there waspre-existing prejudice against Jews. But Denmark wasdifferent. Why? Because Denmark has always beendifferent, they explain, just as Germany isdifferent, England is different, and France isdifferent, each according to its national character.The Germans followed Hitler because of an instinctin the German people, Sven said. “They wanted to bemasters of everything, and when Hitler came, hetouched a place in the German psyche.”

In addition to writing novels, Sven is also one ofDenmark’s leading experts on the Tibetan Buddhistdoctrine of re-incarnation. In his understanding, heexplained, there are two ways of apprehendingreality. There are the flat, technical codes bywhich people learn to make money, build houses, andmaster other people. And then there is theapprehension of the unity of all things, whichinvolves the understanding that when you hurtothers, you are also hurting yourself. “Myunderstanding of God is that everything is containedin God,” he explained. “So, as a matter of fact,when we evolve, the nearer we come to God, thenearer we recognize we are both one and the other.”

Whatever their feelings about Jews or the essentialand inherent unity of God and his creation, manyDanes, especially those who were younger, had nointention of living quietly under German rule. Karenran the Danish underground printing press and editedits propaganda newspaper aimed at German soldiers,Die Warheit (The Truth). Alida’s chocolateshop became a weapons drop and a messaging center.As the area commander of the Holger Danskeresistance group, Knud filled the chocolate shopwith weapons and explosives that were air-dropped bythe British. “It was enough to blow up all ofCopenhagen, when they came to pick it up after thewar,” Tove, who ran the shop together with theirmother, remembered. “I had the back room full ofweapons, and saboteurs sitting in another back roomhaving a meeting, and I stood there with my legsshaking.”

Once the back of the chocolate shop was filled, Knudstashed resistance weapons in his mother’sapartment. “They sat on her parquet floor, cleaningweapons,” Tove remembered. “Knud had to instruct theDanish police’s arms division on how to use theweapons that had been dropped. They were unfamiliarwith them, and if they had tried on their own, theywould have blown themselves up.” Eventually, thelocal resistance members moved their meetings to anantique bookshop, where they placed an exceptionallyugly vase in the window. When the vase was turnedone way, it meant danger; turned the other way, itmeant it was safe for members of the resistance toenter. If a copy of Three Men in a Boat wasdisplayed, that was the signal for the transportgroup to pick up a message.

By 1942, the Danish resistance had graduated fromprinting leaflets, robbing banks, and assassinatingcollaborators to large-scale acts of industrialsabotage. Knud was able to use his waterfrontconnections to smuggle in enough explosives from hisstash to blow up a large section of the Burmeister& Wain shipyard, which was essential to theGerman naval war effort. “Knud knew someone thereand they managed to get the bombs in,” Toveremembered. “He was the brain behind theactivities.” Heightened resistance actions brought afurious response from the Nazis, who launched anall-out war against the resistance, killing hundredsof Danish resistance fighters and imprisoning,torturing, and killing their families.

* * *

At this point, Denmark was home to between8,000–10,000 Jews, who were protected by the Danishgovernment, which collaborated with the Nazioccupation in exchange for a measure of control overdomestic policy. As the Danish resistance, nowregularly supplied by the British, stepped up itsattacks on German officials, soldiers, and shipping,the collaborationist government resigned thatAugust, and the Nazis took full control of thecountry.

For the Jews of Europe, the hour was already late. At the Wannsee conference,held in Berlin in January of 1942, the Nazis hadadopted a concrete program to exterminate everyliving Jew under their rule. “The bizarre torturesand the freakish, brutal murders that have beeninvented for us by the depraved, pervertedmurderers, solely for the suffering of Israel sincethe middle of 1942, are, according to knowledge ofthe words of our Sages of blessed memory, and thechronicles of the Jewish people in general,unprecedented and unparalleled,” wrote the diaristRabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, known to posterityby the title of his eponymous book, theAish Kodesh (Holy Flame). Along with therest of the remnant of the Warsaw Ghetto, Shapirawas murdered following the Jewish uprising in thespring of 1943. Now, in the fall of that year,Danish Jews were to be added to the pyre.

Knud and Karen’s daughter Hanne, who was bombed outof her baby carriage during the German invasion, nowlearned to live with new “uncles” and “aunts,” whoslept under tables and on couches, at times takingup nearly the entire apartment. An unfamiliar knockmeant that everyone had to leave by the back door,and head for either the large basement or the escapepath across neighboring roofs. “They were a littlebit withdrawn, but very nice,” Hanne remembered. “Iremember one of them—and this was before, of course,I went to school—would bring up a book, and sitdown, and show you the alphabet.” The visitors woredark clothing, she remembers, and often left ingroups at night. “I could feel the fear,” Hanneremembers. “That’s one thing that sticks in my mind:the fear. I couldn’t figure out why.”

Fear was not particular to Danish Jews or to otherDanes who hid them in their apartments. It wasespecially acute for those involved in resistanceactivities, like Hanne’s parents. While Karen ranthe underground’s printing press, Knud’s dutiesinvolved more direct forms of physical risk. Hesabotaged trains, included one carrying 40 or 50members of the Copenhagen police who refused tocollaborate directly with the Nazis and were beingsent to concentration camps in Germany. Instead, theescaped policemen made their way to Sweden. “That’swhy the chief of police always hated my father,”Hanne remembers. Knud’s resistance work includedrobbing banks, often with the foreknowledge ofDanish authorities. Knud also executedcollaborators; it was said within the family thathis target list at one point included Karen’sbrother-in-law, who like many Danes from prewarelite circles worked closely with the Nazi-backedDanish collaborationist government.

The violence of the resistance effort made its wayinto the Christiansen home. One time, Hanneremembers, a resistance fighter arrived at theapartment riddled with bullets; his life was savedon the spot by emergency surgery conducted by hergrandfather, the royal physician. The fighter, aformer chess champion named Jens Enevoldsen, “had acool head, a ‘chess’ mind,” Knud’s sister Toverecalled. His job in the resistance was also tomurder informers. As he recuperated in theChristiansen apartment, he taught the young girls toplay chess.

When I asked Tove how Knud and Karen remained socalm in the face of such overwhelming danger,especially with three (soon to be four) youngchildren at home, she gave me a typicallyunderstated Danish shrug. “We all hated the Nazis,”she said.

When danger came too close, the family decamped tothe Rasmussen family hunting lodge near the coast.Well-stocked with rifles and fishing gear, the housewas a rustic refuge, overlooking a pond. “In thesummers, it was just out-of-this-world beautiful,”Hanne remembers. In the family album I took fromPeter, bound in what looks like ancient burlap,there are pictures of the pond, and of the familyenjoying themselves, as well as photos of the forestand of the estuaries that led from nearby the houseto the sea. I also found a solitary photograph ofKnud rowing a boat, from his days with theCopenhagen rowing club. The album is a document of arescue foretold, in which those whose lives were tobe saved are present through their absence.

The Nazi roundup of the Jews of Copenhagen wasscheduled for the evening of Oct. 1, 1943. It was aFriday, a day chosen by the Nazis in the hope offinding Jewish families gathered together forSabbath dinner. Yet the Nazi roundups, conducted byDanish police and 50 Danish volunteer members of theWaffen SS, together netted fewer than 300 people.The rest of Copenhagen’s Jews, who numberedsomewhere around 6,000 souls, out of an estimatedpopulation of perhaps 9,000 Jews in Denmark, werealready living in the storerooms, living rooms, andattics of friends, neighbors, and total strangers,having been warned in advance of the Nazis’ plans.

Postwar histories of the Danish rescue effort do notcredit Knud Christiansen or his colleagues in theDanish resistance for warning Denmark’s Jews aboutthe deportation order. Instead, they mostly credit anaval attaché at the German embassy in Copenhagennamed Georg Duckwitz, the right-hand man of Germanoccupation governor Werner Best. According to thishistory, which remains still widely accepted,Duckwitz tipped off Hans Hedtoft, chairman of theSocial Democratic Party, to the upcoming roundup,and Hedtoft in turn warned Marcus Malchior,Denmark’s acting chief rabbi, on Sept. 28, 1943—theday before the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. OnSept. 29, Rabbi Melchior canceled Rosh Hashanahservices.

Whatever roles were played by Duckwitz, Hedtoft, andMelchior, there are some obvious holes in theaccepted story. First, there is the fact that DanishJews were so thoroughly assimilated that only asmall minority practiced traditional forms of Jewishreligious observance, attended synagogue, or wereotherwise connected to Jewish communal life, whichmakes Jewish institutions an unlikely mechanism forswiftly warning Danish Jews of impending disaster.Second, there is the fact that Duckwitz remained inhis post with no penalty or demotion despite havingblown the whistle on a roundup that was a secret towhich only a few German officials would have hadaccess, making the source of the leak rather easy totrace. Third, there is the fact that Duckwitz’sboss, Werner Best, was an SS Obergruppenführer andhardline Nazi ideologue who organized SSEinsatzgruppen killing units at the behest of hisdirect boss, the sociopathic mass murderer ReinhardHeydrich, earning himself the title “The Butcher ofParis.” It is odd to imagine Best knowing ofDuckwitz’s treasonous activities, at a time whenNazi power was at its zenith, and allowing him tocontinue in his post, instead of sending him toDachau or Buchenwald.

Paradoxically, then, the only way the story ofDuckwitz being the salvation of Denmark’s Jews makessense is if he was acting at Werner Best’sinstruction—which is exactly the scenario proposedin a play titled The Tailor’s Tale byAlexander Bodin Saphir, based on accounts given bythe playwright’s grandfather, an Eastern EuropeanJew who was Best’s wartime tailor. Saphir is alsothe cousin of the Danish actor Kim Bodnia, star ofthe first two seasons of the hit television policedrama The Bridge, making him the mostfamous living Jew in Denmark in the 2010s—which oneimagines didn’t hurt the popularity of Saphir’sconjecture.

In reality, the wide acceptance of theDuckwitz-Hedtoft-Melchior rescue theory probably hasas much to do with postwar Danish politics as itdoes with what actually happened during the war. Itis hard not to notice that the Duckwitz narrative,while making heroes out of a leading SocialDemocratic politician, a Danish rabbi, and a goodGerman, pointedly excises the activities of theDanish underground, which included many activecommunists—who unlike the Social Democrats wereactively hunted by the Nazis. It therefore seemsfair to suggest that the construction of the postwarDanish rescue narrative may have had less to do withscholarly fidelity to the historical record thanwith the all-too-human desire to close the book onthe messy and unpleasant reality of official Danishcollaboration with the Nazis—while at the same timeshoring up the legitimacy of the postwar Danishpolitical order and the larger NATO order in whichit was contained, and delegitimizing its communistrivals.

One answer to who gave the original warning of theimpending roundup of Danish Jews on Oct. 1, 1943,may be found in these pages. It may also be true, asoften happens in such cases, that warnings werereceived by several people, from different sources.Whatever the case, it seems clear that it was theDanish resistance that spread the word of theroundups throughout Copenhagen, found places forDanish Jewish refugees to stay with their neighbors,and organized the great flotilla that would ferrythe vast majority of Danish Jews, along with otherJews who were then resident in Denmark, to safety.

The mass rescue of the Jews of Denmark from theNazis by their countrymen, a feat that is unique inthe history of World War II and the Holocaust, isworth retelling an endless number of times,especially because there are so few stories like it.The urgency of such retellings can only increase asliving memories of that event disappear into piousrecitations of received narratives and silentmemorials. The point of all memorials, whethercarved of stone or presented in exciting newaudio-visual formats, is to allow victims andcollaborators as well as their children to go onwith their lives by putting whatever terrible eventsthey memorialize safely in the past. If a memorialis successful, then the agonized stone figures ortalking holograms approved of by museum boards andprize committees can take their proper place asfamily amusements and roosts for pigeons.

Faced with the reality of shattered worlds in whichvictims and perpetrators must continue to walk thesame streets, shop together in the same stores, andsend their children to the same schools, it is hardto argue with the idea that the needs of the livingshould be privileged over the repetition ofagonizing and unsettling truths. Yet the more guiltand victimhood are insisted upon, the more thecontradictions of the larger enterprise of publicmemorialization become plain. If the point ofmemorialization is to remember the dead, then whybuild memorials—whose not-so-hidden purpose is tolicense forgetting? If memorials fail to puthorrible and disturbing events in the past, in theinterests of social peace, then why build them atall? Clearly the buck has to stop somewhere. Butwhere?

One answer can be found by highlighting thedifference between memorialization and memory.Memorialization asks us to forget the past on behalfof the living, but memory requires us to forgetourselves in order to allow the ghosts of the pastto speak. Hearing the voices of ghosts firstrequires us to resist the natural impulse to paperover the strangeness of such encounters.

Knud Christiansen rarely spoke to his children abouthis wartime experiences in the Danish resistance,some of which were no doubt frightening and dark inan internal war that pitted Danes against their owncountrymen and families. He displayed less reticencewhen it came to the Nazi attempt to murder Denmark’sJews. “He heard that there was a robbery at one ofthe synagogues,” his daughter Marianne remembered.“The only thing that was taken was this book withall the names of the Jewish community.”

What all memorials have in common is the aimof allowing victims and collaborators, aswell as their children, to go on with theirlives by putting whatever terrible eventsthey memorialize safely in the past.

That night, looking out the window of his apartmenton the docks, Knud saw two large steamships in theharbor. The ships appeared to be empty, with nopassengers or crew on board.

Knud Christiansen loved ships. He was a boat fiend,who spent nearly all his spare hours on the water,rowing and sailing. “So he thought, ‘This is veryinteresting,’” Marianne remembered. “‘Why wouldthese big, empty steamships be in the harbor?They’re not bringing arms. They’re not bringingpeople. What are they there for?’”

Anyone involved in the Danish resistance would nothave had to think very hard to come up with apossible or even likely answer to that question. By1943, everyone in Europe knew what the Nazis weredoing to the Jews. The deportation of Jews fromneighboring Norway to Nazi death camps the previousfall suggested that a similar fate awaited DanishJewry. Now that the Nazis were in direct control ofDenmark, only the date of the deportation orderremained a mystery. In Knud’s telling, at least,that date was now clear.

Knud brought his news of the empty ships to theresistance. Flyers and handbills were soon printedup on Karen’s press and posted across Copenhagen,warning Jews not to return to their homes.Resistance groups also instructed bus drivers, taxidrivers, and others to help spread the word.

On the night of Oct. 1, 1943, Knud played his usualgame of bridge with the Philipsons, the two Jewishbrothers from whom he bought leather. (Marianne hasa photograph of Knud playing cards with thebrothers, with everyone looking dapper in theirsuits.) After the game was over, Knud warned themboth not to go home. However, one of the brothersdisregarded Knud’s warning and returned to hishouse, where he was promptly arrested by the Nazisand put into a detention area, from which Jews wereto be transported to the ships, and then toconcentration camps. Knud made repeated visits tothe detention area until he convinced, or bribed, orthreatened a guard, who finally released thePhilipson brother.

Was Knud Christiansen in fact the source of thewarning to Danish Jews to stay home, in order toavoid deportation? In the case of the Philipsonbrothers, he surely was. And perhaps for hundreds orthousands of others also. The only real knowledge wehave of these events comes now from the voices ofghosts.

Perhaps the most famous story or legend connected tothe attempted deportation of Denmark’s Jews is thatof King Christian’s ride. On the morning of thescheduled deportations, the King is said to havepinned a yellow star to the chest of his jacketbefore going out on his usual morning jaunt aroundCopenhagen on horseback, to emphasize that the Jewswere Danes. While there is no firsthand evidence tosuggest that King Christian ever wore a yellow staron his morning rides or elsewhere, latter-dayattempts at debunking King Christian’s ride as amyth often transmit more historical falsehood thanthe anecdote itself. Indeed, if anything, the storymay understate both the King’s feelings and theimportance of his actions in saving Denmark’s Jewsfrom slaughter.

In his diary, several weeks before the scheduledroundup, the King wrote:

When you look at the inhumane treatment of Jews,not only in Germany but occupied countries aswell, you start worrying that such a demandmight also be put on us, but we must clearlyrefuse such this due to their protection underthe Danish constitution. I stated that I couldnot meet such a demand towards Danish citizens.If such a demand is made, we would best meet itby all wearing the Star of David.

In the days and weeks following Oct. 1, the King’sactions continued to match the words he wrote in hisdiary. The royal palace, which included Karen’sfather, found a particularly ingenious way tosupport the population of Copenhagen in the work ofhiding Jews in private homes, a solution that savedthe Jews from immediate deportation but createddifficulties of its own—beginning with the logisticsof feeding unexpected guests. “Big pots were neededto feed many people,” Marianne recalled. “So, on acertain day, all these pots were put out the back ofthe Palace, as if they were being thrown out.” Daneswho needed large pots could go around to the palaceand take a pot from the King’s own kitchen to feedtheir new aunts and uncles and cousins.

Knud and Karen needed plenty of new pots: At onetime, the sisters recall, the Christiansens had 29fugitives staying in their apartment. The fact thatthe Christiansens’ guests were Jewish was not, asKnud’s older daughters remember, a point of anyparticular note. “In Denmark, we didn’t know thedifference between a Christian and a Jew,” Hanneremembers. “They were just all neighbors andfriends. We didn’t say, ‘Are you Jewish?’”

Among the guests in their apartment was a GermanJewish refugee named Max Ravitzer. “I remember theway he looked, a short, stout fella with a big,smiling face,” Jytte recalled. “He was just kind,somebody you could have confidence in. We never sawhim after the war.”

Max Ravitzer would stand out from the dozens ofother Jews who passed through the Christiansens’apartment not just because he was German but alsobecause his story was documented in the aftermath ofthe war and then again decades later. It was theserecords that led to Knud’s recognition in theclosing years of his life by Yad Vashem as one ofthe Righteous Among the Nations—gentiles who haddemonstrably risked their own lives to save Jewsfrom the Nazis.

As editor of the underground newspaperDie Warheit, which targeted German soldiersin Denmark, and also as Knud’s wife, Karen’s lifewas in constant danger, which she routinely playeddown in her later years with her characteristic dryhumor. “I had murderers and whatever staying withus. They were very nice,” she remembered. “Theywould carry wood out for me, darn my husband’ssocks.” Her father, the court physician, who wasboth proud and afraid of her underground work,treasured his copies of Die Warheit, whichhe buried in a metal box in his garden. For herpart, Karen recalled, “I never thought about it.That is why war is fought by young people who don’tthink.” The Nazis put a price on her head of 10,000kroner.

“You have to be very careful,” she reflected, whenasked about how she stayed alive in Copenhagen witha price on her head at the height of the war.“Either you trust people, or you don’t.” Her part inthe resistance, as she understood it, was to carryout the orders she received from higher up. “I knewmy little thing and didn’t know too much,” she latertold an interviewer.

“How about your husband?” the interviewer asked.

“He did his own thing,” Karen answered. “He justdisappeared once in a while.”

“And you didn’t talk about what he was doing?”

“No,” Karen answered. “The less you know, thebetter.”

Yet hiding nearly the entire Jewish community ofDenmark for over a month and then moving them tosafety in Sweden required a collaborative effortthat was markedly less compartmentalized and securethan the usual rigors of underground work—andrequired far greater levels of social solidarity. Inan interview, Karen recalled her husband’sleatherwork as being connected to a larger shop runby a tanner, who hid Jews in his attic. “At thattime my husband was dealing with leather, and therewas this tanner who had a shop in the middle ofCopenhagen,” she said. “And in his attic he hadabout 20 Jews living. Anytime we had a boat ready,we just went there and got them. We had somebodytaking them from the attic to the railway stationand then we took them up the coast from there downto the beach. I was one of them that brought themdown and my husband and other people would row themover.”

Knud’s brother Jorgen accompanied Max to the huntinglodge at Espergaerde, which involved a trip bytrain. “That was not very easy if they looked veryJewish,” recalled Knud’s sister Tove, who made thetrip herself perhaps a dozen times. “On the trainwere many officers and German soldiers.” When theyreached the lodge, Knud would call the firedepartment, which brought his rowing shell down tothe ocean, and hid it in the bushes. Then, undercover of darkness, and depending on the tides, hewould row his guests one by one across the narrowstrait to Sweden, which welcomed the Jews of Denmarkwith open arms, despite the country’s officialposition of wartime neutrality, and a de factoworking alliance with the Nazi state.

But why?

Here, too, it is necessary to listen to ghosts. Inthis case, the person who likely knew the answerbetter than anyone was Niels Bohr, theworld-renowned physicist who in 1943 was probablyCopenhagen’s most famous citizen, apart from KingChristian himself. Bohr, the father of the eponymousatomic model for which he won the 1922 Nobel Prizein physics, was thoroughly Danish; born of a Jewishmother, he was classified under German race laws asa Jew. Since the late 1930s, the brilliantphysicist, who was also handsome, selfless, andpersonally daring, had devoted himself to smugglingfellow physicists out of Germany and otherNazi-controlled territories, all the whilecontinuing his famous argument with the physicistAlbert Einstein, who had fled Europe for Princeton,New Jersey.

The argument between Einstein and Bohr that began inthe 1920s would define and shape 20th-centuryphysics—in favor of Bohr’s views for the first halfof the century, and then later leaning back towardEinstein’s. Where Einstein was the last greatprogenitor of the clockmaker model of a physicalreality governed by objective mechanical laws (“Goddoes not play dice with the universe”), the“Copenhagen Interpretation” advanced by Bohr and hisdisciples insisted that the act of observation wasitself a foundational part of existence. In thefamous thought experiment devised by Bohr’sassistant, Ernest Schrödinger, a cat in a box istherefore both dead and alive until attempts aremade to ascertain its qualities by an outsideobserver. Schrödinger’s paradox suggests that aninfinite number of possible worlds may thereforeexist simultaneously at every moment, with eachdepending on the position of the observer. In Bohr’sown example, presented at the famous 1927 Copenhagenconference on quantum mechanics, while waveequations might describe where entities likeelectrons might be located, those entities didn’texist as electrons until someone went looking forthem. In Bohr’s words, the entities in questiontherefore had no “independent reality in theordinary physical sense.”

Bohr’s understanding of quantum mechanics wassomething more, in his view, than mysticism dressedup as science. The physicist sought to demonstratethat the act of looking influenced the probabilitydistribution while at the same time allowing anentity to be defined as a particle located at aCartesian coordinate. As Bohr’s other greatdisciple, Werner Heisenberg, put it, “Everythingobserved is a selection from a plenitude ofpossibilities and a limitation on what is possiblein the future.” Furthermore, Bohr postulated, theeffect of measuring one particle could alsonecessarily affect another particle with which itwas entangled, regardless of the physical distancebetween them, an idea that Einstein derided as“spooky action at a distance.”

The Copenhagen Interpretation of the Danish rescueeffort therefore constitutes only one of manyparallel chains of cause and effect—this onecentered on Niels Bohr. That story goes somethinglike this: Since before the beginning of the war,Bohr had been instrumental in smuggling Germanphysicists, most of them Jewish, out of Germany tosafe houses in Copenhagen, from which they madetheir way to neutral countries like Sweden. Fromthere, the physicists were relocated to Britain andthe United States, where they were instrumental inthe evolution of the Manhattan Project.

When the Nazis took over Denmark, Bohr fled toSweden. There, he received a phone call from theLondon office of the legendary film impresarioAlexander Korda, a Hungarian-born Jewish filmproducer, director, and screenwriter whosuccessively made his mark in the Hungarian,Austrian, German, American, and British filmindustries between the wars. Korda is known toposterity through dozens of films, includingThings to Come,The Thief of Baghdad, andThe Third Man. In 1942, he was knighted forhis contributions to the British war effort.

Korda played an active role in British intelligenceefforts in Europe both before and during World WarII, with personal connections that went right to thetop of the British political system: Having hiredWinston Churchill as an editor and producer duringthe politician’s “wilderness years” in the 1930s,Korda remained close to Britain’s wartime primeminister, as well as to one of Churchill’s oldestpersonal friends—Lieutenant-Colonel Claude Dansey,the assistant chief of Britain’s Secret IntelligenceService (SIS). In 1937, Dansey arranged for Korda’scompany, London Film Productions, to provide coverfor his agents, who were duly credentialed asscreenwriters and film researchers and sent to workon a slew of imaginary films in European capitals.In addition to churning out wartime propaganda forBritish and American audiences, and providing coverfor British spies, Korda, according to hisbiographer Charles Drazin, was also very personallyand deeply concerned about the fate of EuropeanJewry.

But the person calling Niels Bohr from the filmproducer’s office was not Alexander Korda himself.Rather, it was the Swedish-born actress GretaGustafsson. She had met the physicist in 1923 whileworking with the Finnish-Swedish film directorMauritz Stiller, who brought her to Hollywood andgave her the stage name Greta Garbo.

Like Korda, Garbo, who starred in the 1931 filmabout the British spy Mata Hari, had close ties toBritain’s wartime intelligence services. A dedicatedanti-fascist, she dreamed of assassinating the Nazidictator, Adolf Hitler, who reportedly had a crushon her. Failing in that goal, the actress spent thewar years providing MI6 with intelligence aboutprominent Nazi sympathizers in Sweden and othercountries who found it hard to resist spilling theirsecrets to the world’s most mysterious and alluringwoman. The Swedish King Gustav V was also known tobe enamored of Garbo.

What Bohr and Garbo spoke about on the phone thatday is unknown. Presumably, though, the call was notmade to satisfy either Garbo’s curiosity aboutquantum mechanics or Bohr’s interest in Hollywood.Rather, the call was likely made at the behest ofthe patron that Korda, Garbo, and Bohr all shared incommon—British intelligence.

As unlikely as it might have seemed to either manbefore the war, by late 1943, MI6 Chief StewartMenzies, the most important Allied spymaster duringWorld War II, had few agents or contacts anywhere inthe world more important than Niels Bohr. The Danishphysicist was a central figure in what would proveto be one of the war’s most decisive secretbattles—the Allied attempt to develop a nuclearweapon while denying that weapon to the Nazis. Agiant of modern physics, Bohr was central to bothefforts as the patron and rescuer of some of themost important physicists in the world, many of whomplayed key roles in the Manhattan Project. Bohr wasalso an irreplaceable source of Allied intelligenceon the Nazi bomb effort through his continuingcontact with Werner Heisenberg, his former studentand assistant, who was now the central theoreticianof the Nazi bomb program.

The significance of Bohr’s network to the Britishwent beyond the intelligence he provided on theNazis. It also constituted Britain’s majorcontribution to the Manhattan Project, making theDanish physicist the main source of British insightinto and leverage over the American attempt todevelop a new super-weapon—an effort that, ifsuccessful, could not only decide the war but alsoreshape the future balance of world power away fromboth Germany and Great Britain and toward the UnitedStates. Any semi-reasonable request that Bohr madeof British intelligence in late 1943 was thereforelikely to have been granted.

What is known, according to biographers of both KingGustav V and Garbo, is that, following her call withBohr, Garbo placed a second call to the King ofSweden, requesting a private audience for bothherself and the Danish physicist. The Swedish Kinggranted her request. At that meeting, which was heldin late September (there are disagreements about theexact date, as the meeting understandably does notappear on the King’s official calendar), Gustav Vagreed to risk Nazi displeasure, the neutrality ofhis country, and his throne by offering full asylumto Denmark’s entire Jewish population—in response,one might infer, to Garbo’s charms, plus whateverguarantees Garbo and Bohr conveyed from the British.

The story of how a brilliant physicist, a famousactress, and the King of Sweden laid the necessarygroundwork for the rescue of Denmark’s Jews restslargely on circumstantial evidence; the factssupporting this theory are only facts because of thechoice to tell the story from one angle and notanother. That said, there are no matters of fact todispute in this story, only the pattern in whichthey are arranged.

In support of the conjecture underlying my chosenpattern, it further seems relevant that neitherGreat Britain nor the United States showed muchinterest in rescuing Jews from any other countryaside from Denmark in 1943, or at any other datebefore or during the war—let alone in helping toarrange for the mass exodus of an entire Jewishpopulation. Since Danish Jews played no discernablerole in the Allied war effort (by requiring nearlythe entire attention and resources of the Danishunderground for a period of nearly two months, therescue of Denmark’s Jews deprived the Allies ofuseful assets close to Germany), and Sweden had noprior history of being particularly friendly towardJews (who were only granted equality before the lawin 1910), and since Greta Garbo was neither Danishnor Jewish, it can reasonably be surmised that theSwedish grant of asylum for Jewish Danes was theprice that Niels Bohr requested from the British forhis work, which in turn made the rower’s activitiespossible.

In the chaotic days of October 1943, the hidden Jewsof Copenhagen were smuggled by train and car to thesmall fishing towns along the North Zealand coast,where they crowded into new hiding places in attics,warehouses, and churches. In the picturesque fishingvillage of Gilleleje, Jews could be found living inthe household of almost every family. Danishpolicemen organized to help transport the Jews, asdid the Danish Medical Association, which used itsambulances to transport Jews whose medicalcertificates bore names like “Hansen” and “Olsen”and who were wrapped in plaster casts and bandages.Some were driven in garbage trucks and fish trucksto the coast, where they waited for boats to takethem to Sweden. Of the 8,000–10,000 Jews in Denmark in 1943, itis estimated that only 400 or so were deported by the Nazis—including a group of over 80Jews hidden in the Gilleleje church attic, who were taken into custody bythe Gestapo, along with town residents whose neighbors had presumably informed on them. Of the rest, perhaps 8,000 Jews were successfully evacuated from Denmark to Sweden.

I set out to Gilleleje one morning in 2018 withKnud’s son Peter from the old train station inCopenhagen, retracing the route taken by themajority of the city’s hidden Jews. “The boat peoplegot on here,” Peter told me. Built in 1905, thewooden structure is located across the street fromCopenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, a kind of permanentramshackle amusement park with rides for children.The ceiling of the station resembles two upside-downboats placed next to each other—the supply of expertshipbuilders in Denmark in 1905 presumably exceedingthe supply of roofers.

We jostle our way through a sea of happy, moderatelywell-disciplined schoolchildren carrying backpacksand suitcases on their way to summer camp, as partof an exchange program with families in Jutland.Seventy-five years after the end of World War II,the Danes are unique among the nations of Europe intheir desire to reproduce themselves. The Germansand Italians, who lost the war, don’t reproduce.Neither do the Swedes, who remained neutral duringthe war. Without the need to fill younger agecohorts from outside the country, Denmark acceptsfewer refugees than other European Union states andimposes stricter rules for obtaining citizenship.

We exit near Espergaerde, a town that is proud ofits fences. Even the pond is fenced in. Theonce-rural Rasmussen cottage now features a perfecttiled Danish kitchen and an NBA-logo basketball hoopin the backyard. Birds twitter in the trees.

I meet Karina and Sven, who live here now. They seemlike nice people. After Peter explains the originsand purpose of our journey, Sven laughs. “Lucky foryou,” he says, addressing me in Danish. “Or else,you wouldn’t be here.”

If Karina and Sven’s satisfaction in being Danish isentirely unearned, my assumption of the role thathas been thrust upon me feels even weirder: I amapparently the inheritor of a historical debt, onethat my ancestors incurred to their ancestors, whichthey have inherited. Still, from their perspective,it must have also felt legitimately disorienting andstrange to have someone you have never met show upat your home one morning with a claim on theproperty, even if that claim only consists of theright to remember.

Peter, who grew up here, is bemused by the exchange.No one can deny that this is the house of hischildhood memories, which are his. We move on, withPeter leading the way with his walking stick. In thecool of the forest, enlivened by the summerbirdsongs, it is hard to imagine the pleasant pathfrom the house to the sea as anyone’s Golgotha.“These are 100-year-old beech trees,” Peter saysadmiringly. Alone in this village, they witnessedthe journeys I am writing about. The trees havesomething to say to us. They are Jewish trees, Itell Peter, who gives a sardonic snort at the ideaof beech trees in what he imagines to be Judaicgarb—a fitting metaphor for the idiocy of labelinghuman beings as either this thing or that, whichmakes as much sense as calling trees or rocksProtestant or Jewish.

Only, I wish to tell Peter, that is not what I meantat all. I am serious about the trees being Jewish.The founding historical achievement of the Jews isgenerally presented in Western literature as“morality,” “ethics,” or “law,” as embodied in theTen Commandments. Yet dispelling thatinterpretation, which is offered, in similarlysonorous tones, by Jews and Christians alike, takesvery little work: The ancient Greeks defined ethicswithout much reference to their gods, who weremanifestly unethical. Before the Greeks, Hammurabiwrote his own code of laws.

The Jewish contribution to Western consciousness isat once more epistemologically profound and—to some,at least—more troubling than the ideas of ethics orlaw, which are common to many peoples includingthose who do not embrace the idea of a monotheisticGod. What Jews invented was linear time, whichemerged out of a perception of human experience asan ongoing dialogue between God and humankind. TheJewish idea of time gave existence an inherentdirection and purpose that replaced the pagan ideaof cyclical recurrence. It created the idea ofhumanity as something separate from the rest ofnature. With the invention of time, Jews created theidea of the human, along with two other ideas thatcontinue to shape the Western consciousness: memoryand home.

The reason why the trees are Jewish, I want to tellPeter, is also why your home is not also my home.Each of us is a prisoner of a unique strand ofhistorical time, which is as different for me as itis for every other person on earth. Only God canknow me, and there is no equality before God orbetween persons. His relationship to me is as uniqueas his relationship to you.

On the hill above the sea is a small white church.We enter the church, a fantastical space whose roofis built like the hull of a boat, just like in thetrain station. A fleet of little boats hangs fromthe ceiling, which is a nice touch, I think. It is acommon decoration here, Peter answers. Lots oflittle boats, hanging from a big boat, which isupside-down.

Here or nearby is the site of a missionary buildingthat was cared for by an old man who the resistancefighters called the Philosopher. “He took care of alot of the Jews, and they wanted to pay him, and hesaid, ‘No one wants to get paid for charity,’” Karenremembered. So he did it for free, just everybodywho came there got shipped over.” Among those herescued was the Fortentaub boy, from the departmentstore family, who traded places with Karen duringher two years in Berlin, along with his wife and hisparents—all of whom made it safely to Sweden, beforereturning to Denmark after the war.

The Jewish idea of time gave existence aninherent direction and purpose that replacedthe pagan idea of cyclical recurrence. Itcreated the idea of humanity as somethingseparate from the rest of nature. With theinvention of time, Jews created the idea ofthe human, along with two other ideas thatcontinue to shape the Western consciousness:Memory and home.

Outside the church is a graveyard in whichgenerations of local fishermen and their wives areburied. From here, we can watch the big white ferryboats making their regular trips to Sweden and back.Judging by the speed at which they travel, it mighttake an exceptionally strong rower maybe an hour oran hour and a half to cover the distance between thecoasts.

To assume the role of a Jew who is grateful to theDanes for having been saved is less risky,emotionally speaking, than to imagine that I wouldhave rowed fugitives across the narrow sea in thedark. It is eerier to imagine being rescued thanbeing a rescuer: At the height of one’s own fear andincapacity, someone else will do somethingmiraculous, and you will find yourself alive, livingmore or less happily in Sweden, eating knäckebrödwith herring. That the craggy features of theSwedish coastline are so plainly visible from heredoesn’t make being a rescuer any easier tocontemplate; it makes it harder, by suggesting thatrowing over there is something that a person notthat different from me might accomplish in maybe anhour, absent the paralyzing fear I already feel atthe thought of such a voyage, in broad daylight,nearly 75 years later, with no Nazis in evidence—theproper response to that mental journey being shame.

The fried fish place on the docks is still there. Aswe inhale the smells of frying oil and salt water,Peter happily recalls his childhood visits on histricycle. “And then I zoomed down to the harbor andhad crepes,” he says. “I ate loads of them.” Why didpeople like his father help to rescue those who werein danger, I ask him. “Because they were there, andit was right,” Peter said bluntly. “Also, let’s beclear, he was impressive.”

Later that day, we visit the church at Gilleleje, inwhose pews someone has carved the wordsYevarechecha Adonai Veyishmerecha, “may thelord bless you and watch over you,” the beginninglines of the priestly blessing recited by fathers totheir children during the Sabbath and holidays. Thedeep carving in the wood, in Hebrew letters, looksold. It is impossible to tell whether it is alatter-day benediction of thanks to the people ofthe village or if it was carved by one of the Jewishrefugees who came here hoping for deliverance—80 ofwhom were taken from the church attic by theGestapo, which sent them to the TheresienstadtGhetto. From there, they were transported toAuschwitz.

* * *

One of the children who made the sea passage fromDenmark to Sweden in the fall of 1943 was an11-year-old child named Torben Ulrich. Now a spry,Gandalf-like figure with a long white beard, he hasbeen a jazz critic, a musician, a tennis champion,an adept of Buddhist philosophies and practice. WhenI visited him in his sleek modern Danish houseoverlooking the San Francisco Bay, I was struck byhis long, tapering fingers, which appear to stretchnearly twice the length of his palms—a musician’shands. When I ask him what instrument he plays, helaughs, delighted by the setup. “I play the foolmost of the time,” he says.

As it turns out, we share a common musical hero inLouis Armstrong, with whom Ulrich conversed atlength after the war in a hotel in Copenhagen, whilethe jazz great sat in his bathtub. “I feel that thatwas sort of like going to school in some sense,” heremembered, of his afternoons with Armstrong at theHotel Codan. “We were sitting there at the edge ofthe bathtub, and he would sit there for hours, withthe water running a little bit so it stayed warm.”

Whether ending in icy seas or in warm baths, Ulrichhas learned that human fates vary in ways that defythe logic of cause and effect. “Terrible thingshappen all the time, and I’ve seen them,” he says.Which is not to say that human goodness makes nomark on the universe, he adds. “There is a strangekind of ripple effect when people do good things.”In his experience, he says, human goodness is moreof an instinct than the considered outcome of anyparticular set of ethical or intellectualprinciples, whether properly or improperly applied.“In my experience, when people do very good,selfless actions, they don’t think about them atall,” he says. “People ask why, what was the reason,what were you thinking, what was your calculation?There wasn’t any.”

It is eerier to imagine being rescued thanbeing a rescuer: At the height of one’s ownfear and incapacity, someone else will dosomething miraculous, and you will findyourself alive, living more or less happilyin Sweden, eating knäckebröd with herring.

Like Niels Bohr, Torben Ulrich grew up in a countrywhere it was common for a Jewish or part-Jewishchild to grow up without much conscious sense thatthey were Jewish. “I knew all these people namedSamuelson, or Philipson, or Goldschmidt,” heremembers. “If you said, ‘Do you know that all thosepeople are Jewish?’ I would say, ‘Yeah, of course Iknow.’ But it almost didn’t register beyond thenames or something.” For Danish children, Christianor not, the high point of the calendar year wasChristmas Eve, when families gathered around theChristmas tree, sang songs, and ate traditionalDanish pork dishes. “There were all these Jewssitting around the Christmas tree and singing anddancing and holding hands,” he remembers, of his ownchildhood holidays. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have beenso baffled or completely bewildered when all of thisbegan to be a question, you know?”

For Torben Ulrich, as for many Danish children withsimilar backgrounds, the most shocking thing aboutthe Nazi invasion was the discovery that they wereJewish, and that as a result they now livedpermanently elsewhere. “Everybody was thinking it’llblow over, or ‘come on, let’s not get too excited,’Degal Sku nort,” he says, using the Danishphrase. “My brother and I and my mom, we went overto these friends, and we stayed there overnight. Iwas playing with these kids you know, Hanne and Oleand all these good Danish names.”

The living room of the house where the Ulrichs tookrefuge on Oct. 1 was interesting, he remembers. Onthe walls were blackboards covered with mathematicalformulae inscribed by the house’s owner, theirneighbor Harald Bohr—Niels Bohr’s brother, who was afriend of Torben’s father. In the middle of thenight, Ulrich remembers being awakened by a knock onthe door. It was a group of German soldiers, whowere looking for a different Jewish family, perhapsthe Bohrs. The next morning, he returned to his ownhouse with his brother and mother. They packed a fewsuitcases, and left.

Life was different after that, he remembers. For onething, he no longer lived at any fixed address. Foranother, he stopped going to school. One afternoon,his mother packed their bags and together theyboarded a train, with strict instructions to keepsilent.

That train ride was the moment of greatestdissociation between the person he had known himselfto be—a Danish child—and the person he understoodhimself to be now. He was a hunted refugee in hisown country. He was a Jew. He remembers looking atthe other Jewish refugees on the train in disbeliefat the idea that he was one of them. “They’resitting with all these bags on this little train,”he remembers. “I mean, nobody would ever sit withthat many bags on such a train. It was like somecomic strip or something.” Torben brought along hisclarinet, which he held to his chest as an emblem ofsafety—an artifact from the world before.

The refugees got off the train at the small stationin Gilleleje and started to walk. It was earlyevening in October, and it was dark. The refugeesscattered to the addresses they had been given.Torben remembers sitting in a nice room in a fishinghouse, hugging his clarinet. “In some sense I wasstill in my sort of cloud of unknowing orunbelieving,” he remembers. “You remove yourselffrom the sheer concreteness of it,” he recalls.“Maybe I’ll understand it later or something.”

About an hour later, they received instructions towalk down to the dock. As they boarded the ship, itstarted to rain. Seventeen refugees were packedbelow decks. Many of them were elderly with baggage.After a while, he remembers becoming attuned to thesound of the engine and the rhythms of the ship.Someone asked him to hold a child up on hisshoulders. As the ship left the dock, he could feelthe child’s legs around his neck, with his feettouching his clarinet.

All of a sudden, the boat stopped, and wouldn’trestart. Someone, most likely a member of the ship’screw, had thrown sand into the engine before theycould make it out of the harbor. In the dark, hecould hear the firing of a machine gun. The refugeesdisembarked onto some nearby rocks, where they stoodshivering in the rain with their baggage, a scene ofmisery that was soon illuminated by a Germanspotlight.

Once captured, the refugees were taken fromGilleleje to Elsinore, where they were brought to acamp and interrogated. Mealtimes in the camp onlystrengthened his sense of estrangement. “I didn’tunderstand a word they were saying, and I didn’tunderstand the way they were eating,” he remembers.

Eventually, Torben’s father, who wasn’t Jewish,succeeded in getting his wife and two sons out ofthe camp. Torben returned to his old school, with anote asking for his absence to be excused, as iftheir flight from their home, the abortive boatride, and the terrifying internment, with itssuggestion of further displacement to somewhereworse, had been the equivalent of a mild cold. “Iwent back to school, and it went okay the first hourand in the second hour it was okay,” he remembers.The third hour was math, where his teacher asked himto recite the previous day’s lesson. When Torbendrew his attention to the note, the teacher read itand again asked him to recite. When he was stillunable to recite the lesson, the teacher struck himin the face. He gathered his books, left school, andnever went back.

The family’s second attempt to escape across the seawas less eventful. Before the ship left the harbor,a man opened the hatch to the compartment where therefugees were hidden and said “good evening” inDanish. Then he closed the hatch. A few hours later,they were safe in Sweden.

In Stockholm, where the Ulrichs settled, Torben wassent to a private boarding school for the childrenof diplomats, recommended to his father by hisfriend, the uncle of the Swedish diplomat RaoulWallenberg, who would become famous as a rescuer ofJews in Hungary, before being murdered in a Sovietprison camp. “I can play my clarinet, I can playtennis, I can play soccer, I can play band, I can goswimming, I can listen to philosophy,” Torbenrecalled in our conversation. “But I’m not Swedish.And I don’t belong to this place.” At night, helistened to Betty Comden and Benny Goodman on theVoice of America and dreamed of a world that wouldbe organized according to different principles thanthe world he had been born into, which had beendrowned in an ocean of blood. By the war’s end, hewas good enough at tennis to join the budding worldtennis tour, play in Paris and Wimbledon, and meetother tennis players, musicians, and seekers. It wasthen that he became friendly with the Christiansens,who were fellow non-conformists.

After moving back to Copenhagen, Torben Ulrichplastered the walls of his house with a row ofsayings of Buddhist and Sufi masters, leading up thestairs to the Kabbalistic alchemical table of AdamKadmon. He hung a copy of the Shema, the Jewishproclamation of the oneness of God, in the bathroom,because he liked the forms of the Hebrew letters.His co-editor of Copenhagen’s jazz magazine wasnamed Rabinowich; he was originally from Odessa,where his father had been the chief rabbi. Once,when they were together in the house, Rabinowich hadto use the bathroom, and saw the Shema. “I said,‘Can you read that?’” Ulrich remembered asking. Thestory is important, he explains, because itillustrates the sense of estrangement he mentionedearlier. “I was bewildered about all this while itwas happening,” he remembers. “But he was not, youknow?”

The Kabbalistic chart of the elements that he hungoutside the bathroom was opposite the bedroom of hisson Lars, a hyperactive yet deeply focused child whowas too impatient to play tennis or study Buddhism.As a teenager, he started a heavy metal band, whichhe imagined would be the heaviest band in the world.Driven by his ferocious drumming, the band expresseda nameless rage in the face of a nameless hatred—anemotion that tens of millions of listeners aroundthe world took as their own.

Where that anger came from is open to a millioninterpretations, of course. But its association withsomething Lars Ulrich felt during his childhood canbe reasonably deduced from his decision—inspired nodoubt by the chart of the elements that hishalf-Jewish Danish father who fled to Sweden twiceon a boat to escape the Nazis hung outside hisbedroom door—to call the band Metallica.

That’s karma.

A city of bridges built on an archipelago in themiddle of the Baltic sea, the Swedish capital ofStockholm radiates a healthy self-satisfaction thathas been fortified against time and the elements bygenerations of inherited wealth derived from tradingand industry, founded on the country’s long andoften brutal history of military conquest in EasternEurope. The prosperity of the Swedish capital isboth forceful and fortress-like, as expressed in themassive amounts of stone and iron used in itsconstruction. It is from Stockholm that Swedenbestows its Nobel Prizes upon the most brilliant menand women in the world—except for the Nobel PeacePrize, which is awarded in the Norwegian city ofOslo.

Swedes generally consider themselves to beenlightened peace-loving universalists with a dutyto share their exemplary practices in a host ofareas ranging from generous social benefits andasylum laws to equality between the sexes. Manycontemporary Swedes would at least pretend to besincerely shocked to hear a visitor proclaim thattheir country was once the most rapacious conqueringpower in Europe, or that the definition of Sweden asa Scandinavian country rests on the genocidalobliteration of the cultural identity of theaboriginal Sámi people, many of whom still struggleagainst legal discrimination to make their livingsfrom trapping, fishing, and herding reindeer. Thereis no place on earth without its own bottomless wellof injustice. In Sweden, campaigns targeting theSámi included laws regulating the size of Sámihouses, a “scientific” institute devoted todemonstrating Sámi racial inferiority, and policiesdesigned to denigrate and obliterate traditionalSámi culture and the nomadic way of life, whichcontinued in Sweden until the 1970s.

It was in the hope perhaps of remedying some part ofthese injustices, as well pursuing more selfishmotives related to the availability of cheap manuallabor, that Swedish immigration authorities took thefateful step in 2013 of declaring that all asylumseekers from the civil war in Syria, a county withno particular cultural, religious, or historicalties to Sweden, aside from the fact that bothcountries begin with the letter S, wouldreceive permanent residency in the country. In 2015alone, Sweden, a country of 10 million people,accepted 163,000 asylum seekers, perhaps 40% of whomwere from Syria, in addition to large numbers ofrefugees from the conflict-torn countries of Iraq,Bosnia, and Kosovo—a generous act that for someSwedes called to mind the rescue of the far lessnumerous community of Danish Jews during a war thatthe Swedes otherwise spent comfortably avoiding thedestruction suffered by their neighbors while doingbusiness with the Nazis. By 2016, when the generousoffer of permanent Swedish residency for everyrefugee was reduced to a less-generous offer of athree-year Swedish residency permit, every tenthSwedish citizen was Muslim, with a majority ofchildren under five in many urban districts havingMuslim surnames (in 1975, one out of every 400Swedes was Muslim).

It can be reasonably debated whether the resultinglarge failures of integration that have occurred inSweden were primarily the products of Swedishmonocultural arrogance; smug self-satisfaction; themore general post-Protestant Westerncultural-philosophical error of stipulating thathistory is so much noise and all people are actuallythe same everywhere; or a product of theincomprehension and hostility with whichwar-traumatized immigrants from traditionalsocieties encountered Swedish secularism, whichpresented itself to them as both manifestly immoraland also as an easy mark. At the same time, the waveof violent crime that has resulted from Sweden’smoment of radical openness to refugees from war-tornMiddle Eastern countries and the Balkans is now adefining feature of Swedish society, particularly inlarge cities, even after a decade of claims by theSwedish left that violent crime is an invention ofSwedish fascists, neo-Nazis, and otherright-wingers, bent on undoing the miracle ofSweden’s liberal welfare state.

When I visited Stockholm, armed conflict betweenSwedish authorities and the Kosovar, Syrian, andIraqi crime families who dominate large sections ofStockholm and Malmö, featuring gunfire, firebomb,and grenade attacks on police and fire trucks, andrecently grenade launchers, was a regular feature onthe nightly news, and also plainly audible during anabortive late-night cab ride I took into Södermalm,a high-crime area into which my Uber driver refusedto go further. The situation in Malmö got so badthat Kim Bodnia, the Danish actor whose grandfatherwas Werner Best’s tailor, quit his wildly successfulcrime show, a Danish-Swedish co-production, becausehe found the experience of living and filming inMalmö half the time too threatening and demoralizingto be worth any further participation in the show’ssuccess. By the time Bodnia leftThe Bridge, nearly 80% of Malmö’s Jewishpopulation, which was largely descended fromHolocaust survivors and refugees, had been drivenout by antisemitic demonstrations and violentattacks.

Monica Ravitzer, whom I meet in a café in downtownStockholm, looks less like a refugee, whether Jewishor Syrian, than a healthy blonde Swedish farm girlcelebrating an occasion in late middle age with avisit to the big city. Coincidentally, the day thatshe and I met for coffee was May 5th, theanniversary of the end of World War II. InCopenhagen, candles are lit in the windows. InSweden, May 5th is not a date that people wish toremember.

Monica’s father Max Ravitzer, whose life Knud savedby rowing him to Sweden, where he settled andstarted a family, remains a mystery to her, just asthe rower is a mystery to me. I tell her aboutmeeting Knud Christiansen in his clock shop near myhigh school, and having no idea who he was, and how,thanks to a series of coincidences, I discovered hisstory, and set out on a journey to discover whatlasting effect his goodness had on the world, ifany.

Monica grew up mostly around Malmö, where Max didn’tspeak much about the war, though he took his familyto the synagogue there. In the 1950s, the synagoguein Malmö was a place for Jewish refugees, many ofwhom had lost their families in the Holocaust, tohelp each other search for family members, findwork, and negotiate the complex restitution systemthat Germany had set up to provide minimal paymentsto surviving slave laborers from Nazi ghettoes andconcentration camps. When it came time to discusslarger and more painful questions, the parents wouldtell the children to leave the sanctuary. “It waslike, ‘Why did I survive and they died?’” Monicaremembers. A little blonde girl, she played outsidewith her friends while the discussions went oninside among the men and women with numbers on theirarms.

In school, Monica recalls being shown films ofHitler’s rise to power and Nazi atrocities,including the genocide of Europe’s Jews. In theabsence of any real explanation of what they werelooking at, Monica tells me, many of her classmatesappeared to have taken the films as confirmation ofthe rightness of the anti-Jewish prejudice thatremained common in Swedish society even after thewar. “It wasn’t always that nice to be calledRavitzer,” she recalled. “Sometimes they would bumpus in the head and things like that. Girls called usugly names. Some families thought it would have beenbetter if Max had gone to Auschwitz and died.”

It strikes me as odd that Monica keeps referring toher father as “Max,” even when he is being condemnedby her classmates’ parents to extermination in aNazi death camp. “Why do you keep calling him‘Max’?” I ask her.

“I always called him that,” she explains, notunkindly. “Max wasn’t my biological father.” Bothshe and her sister, she explains, were adopted byMax and his wife Mary, a member of the Danishresistance who fled to Sweden. While her sister’sfamily of origin was Swedish, she continues, herbiological mother was from Northern Germany, nearBreslow—the same area Max was from. She was notJewish, however.

Monica is less Max’s inheritor, genetic orotherwise, than a fellow refugee with her ownpeculiar story of displacement and loss. Her fate inlife was to be hated as a Jew on account of a manwhose story ran both parallel and opposite to herown—a fate that produced a kind of ambivalence thatis neither unkind nor self-hating but rather thelogical product of her own inheritance. Monica’sexperience of the Holocaust mirrors my own: It issomeone else’s tragedy that continues to shape mylife in intimate ways that I would never have freelychosen, but that at the same time would be selfishand even cruel to deny. When I express thesethoughts to Monica, she visibly relaxes. Iunderstand her. She is happy to tell me more aboutMax, the man whose life Knud Christiansen saved byrowing him across the water.

The assumption that continuing attachment toa traumatic past is a human virtue, muchless a pathway to personal self-improvementor family happiness, is a sentiment that isprobably unique to people who have neverexperienced much pain or loss. For those whohave, it is not hard to imagine thatforgetting the past would indeed be ablessing, if it were possible.

The only living Jew in the Ravitzer family, Max wasa disruptive figure whose warmth, electricenthusiasm, quick temper, talent for languages, andhead for scheming made the lives of his daughtersand his wife both exciting and endlessly difficultin a country where stolid temperaments were normal.Max had a mother who died in Auschwitz, and a sisterwho emigrated to Israel. His most striking feature,his daughter remembers, were his eyes—“those darkJewish eyes.”

Max and Mary didn’t get along very well, though thewinner of their arguments was usually Max. He was afountain of emotions, able to cry whenever tearsmight be helpful. At the same time, he was anold-fashioned patriarch who insisted on hisauthority within the home. “I had very bigdifficulties with Max’s way of bringing up kids,”Monica recalled. “It was his law.”

Max’s Judaism was another part of his dominatingpersonality, which found the will to escape fromGermany to Denmark, and then from Denmark to Sweden,while the majority of his fellow German Jews wereloaded onto trains and sent to extermination camps.Max raised his children as Jews, taking them tosynagogue, and celebrating Jewish holidays. Mary litSabbath candles. Still, Monica, who was adopted as ayoung child, never considered herself to be Jewish.

Max used his strong will and wily survival skills tomake money at cards, seduce women, and build a lifefor his family in the Swedish countryside, withoutever staying in any one place very long. “They wouldgo and work at this farm and they would stop, andthey would go work at a different farm,” sheremembers. By the time she was 12 years old, Monicaestimates, the Ravitzers had moved 15 times. “It wasfun,” she admits. “Mother and father would pickcorn, and we would live on the farm, and then wewould move on.”

Max’s attachment to his past during this gypsy lifetook the form of a box that accompanied theRavitzers on every stop of their journey, and whichMax refused to relinquish despite his wife Mary’sentreaties. The box, Monica tells me, which musthave been among the only possessions Max carriedwith him in the rowboat from Denmark, was where Maxkept his papers, letters, and postcards. “Some ofthese postcards were from his mother, written inAuschwitz,” she recalled. “Every time we movedaround, my mother Anne Marie told him, ‘Can’t wethrow them away?’”

It is horrible to imagine the wily survivor with hisdark Jewish eyes, who was good at cards and seducingSwedish women, being urged by his wife to discardhis mother’s last pained testament to her son beforeshe was murdered in the gas chambers. Uponconsideration, however, it is hard to say that hiswife wasn’t also acting out of love, or at leastsome form of healthy pragmatism. The assumption thatcontinuing attachment to a traumatic past is a humanvirtue, much less a pathway to personalself-improvement or family happiness, is a sentimentthat is probably unique to people who have neverexperienced much pain or loss. For those who have,it is not hard to imagine that forgetting the pastwould indeed be a blessing, if it were possible.

Whatever emotional meaning his mother’s postcardsfrom Auschwitz had for Max Ravitzer, they were alsoa practical tool or weapon he used in his lifelongstruggle to wrest some modicum of solace from aworld that had proven itself to be bent onexterminating him. “He knew he could use themsomehow somewhere,” Monica said, “and he used themagainst Germany when he found money.” In the 1960s,he succeeded in gaining reparations from Germany,which he used to buy a large car, as well asproperty in Spain, a country that had expelled itsentire Jewish population some 500 years earlier,before murdering many of the remainingconversos a century later in horrible ways.

It is reasonable to assume that Max Ravitzer feltlittle debt to the people who tried to murder him.His main purpose in life once he made it to Swedenwas survival, followed by his hope of leveraging hissuffering and loss into a place in the sun. Whetherhis decision to share his life with two parentlesschildren was an expression of universalistgenerosity, or an inability to reproduce, is aquestion that Max’s daughter can’t answer. It issimply another part of the mystery of Max.

There was a single moment during her otherwisedisorienting and insecure childhood when Monicarealized that Max’s strangeness was part of a largerstory. That was the night she saw her father ontelevision with Sophia Loren, who reintroduced MaxRavitzer to his rescuer, Knud Christiansen, in aDanish version of This Is Your Life. Monicagreatly admired the Italian actress, and she alsoremembered being introduced to her father’s rescuer.But still, Max’s past was clearly a source ofsuffering for his children that outweighed any senseof meaning or pride that they might have been ableto find there.

* * *

It did not take long before the jubilation withwhich Danes greeted the liberation of their countryturned sour. For many Danes, five years of wartimeoccupation, deportations, torture, and murder calledfor a reckoning with those who collaborated with theNazis. Under Prime Minister Vilhelm Buhl, who servedin the same position for six months in 1942 underthe Nazis, the Danish political parties formed aso-called Unity Government that staged trials inwhich 45 Danish collaborators were executed, whileleading members of the major Danish politicalparties, state bureaucracies, and the police who didbusiness with the Nazis went unpunished.

Knud Christiansen was not eager to reconcile withthose parts of Danish officialdom that had tried tokill him during the war. Meanwhile, the public showtrials of petty Danish collaborators struck theformer resistance fighter as a farce. “All the bigones managed to get off and all the smaller ones gotsentenced,” his sister Tove recalled. Knud had aparticular dislike for Vilhelm Buhl. “He asked theDanish population if we knew of any informers(against the Nazis), and said we should reportthem,” Tove remembered. “A couple of days later, hebecame prime minister. Knud would not stand for it.”

During the war, the work of maintaining law andorder meant collaborating with the Nazis; now itmeant standing by as the state celebrated men whohad until very recently been defined as being amongthe city’s worst criminals. Knud did not thinkhighly of the Copenhagen police, who in turn neverstopped regarding him and his fellow bank robbersand assassins as dangerous criminals. Knud had alsotargeted the police directly during the war. “Onetime the Resistance needed gas,” his wife Karenlater recalled. “So he and some friends stole thepolice gas. They never forgave him that one.” Whenan interviewer suggested that the police might havebeen glad to have Knud steal the gasoline, Karenresponded with wry humor that conveyed some of thebitterness with which members of the Danishunderground viewed the authorities. “The gas was forthe Resistance,” she answered. “The police workedfor the Germans.”

The postwar divisions within Danish society betweenresistance members and collaborators were oftenreplicated within families; according to familylore, Karen’s brother was a Nazi collaborator whowas marked for death by the Resistance. Theassignment to kill him was given to Knud, whosefailure to carry it out did little to bring the twomen closer after the war. These divisions, combinedwith the Danish aversion to boasting andself-flattery, ensured that stories of wartimeheroism and betrayal were rarely passed on. “Theydidn’t have long stories,” recalled Peter, Knud andKaren’s youngest child, of his parents’recollections of their wartime exploits. Instead,Peter heard about his parents’ wartime heroism fromhis nanny, who told him about how their summer househad been used to smuggle Jews to Sweden. “I pushed,‘What happened then? How did you go? Where was it?’”

Answers were not especially forthcoming. Instead,Knud devoted himself to making money, and taking thefamily on adventures. The Christiansens traveled inthe family’s VW bus to Spain, where Knud exchangedDanish currency for gold coins. “He never believedin banks because basically during the war, he was abank robber,” his daughter Hanne explained. “Soevery year, whatever money he had made, we woulddrive down through Germany, Belgium, France, and hewould go to all of the gold markets and he wouldinvest all of the cash in gold coins.” Marianne, theyoungest daughter, built play-castles out of thecoins, which Knud blithely kept in bags around thehouse.

Keeping bags of gold coins around the house turnedout to be a risky thing to do in Copenhagen,especially if you were a former bank robber who hadissues with the police. When Knud and Karen decidedto punish the free-spirited Peter for an infractionby leaving him behind on one of their journeys, the12-year-old Peter decided to take a ferry to Swedenwith a bag of gold, with the intention of buying hisown car. In doing so, he set off a chain ofconsequences that would result in his family’s exilefrom Denmark.

There were holes in Peter’s boyish plan, beginningwith his attempt to pay for a one-way ferry ticketin gold bullion. The Swedish police quickly alertedtheir counterparts in Copenhagen, and arrestedPeter. Once the boy’s identity was established, theCopenhagen police were sure that they had struckgold in more ways than one: Here was proof that KnudChristiansen was not a hero but a criminal. “It wason all the front pages,” Hanne remembers. “This hadto be the biggest gold robbery of the century! Imean, all these wild stories.”

Knud’s trial offered an often-comic replay of thewartime divisions in Danish society, as the policesought to alternately prove that he had stolen thecoins from the National Bank of Denmark (whichdidn’t keep Spanish pesos as part of its goldreserves), or that he had received them as paymentfor rowing Jews to Sweden. Daily, acting as his ownattorney, Knud mocked the arguments of the policemenand the state prosecutor, answering their aspersionsabout his life as a “bank robber” with gibes abouthow the Copenhagen police had enriched themselvesduring the war by cashing Nazi paychecks. Unable toproduce evidence of bank robbery, extortion, ortheft, state prosecutors convicted Knud on chargesof not paying state taxes on his gold purchases. “Itwas personal vengeance,” Karen recalled. Still, theconviction stung. “He wasn’t the same after that,”his daughter Hanne remembered. “He went back forevents and stuff, but he never wanted to stay inDenmark.”

One of the themes I am always alive to in myreporting is the miraculous-seeming symmetries thatemerge out of what we are so often told is thefaceless chaos of human existence, which lacks anyinherent meaning or plan. Yet there is nothingeither mysterious or mystical about the assertionthat form is something other than a subjectiveprojection of human consciousness: To say that theworld in which we live, as well as the way weperceive it, has deeply embedded formal qualities isno different than recognizing the symmetries insideour own cellular structures or in coral reefs thatgrow on the bottom of the ocean. Our perceptions ofthe universe acting on us are at the same time theproducts of something inside us, which acts on theuniverse and gives it form, which we recognize bothas a reflection of ourselves and as somethingseparate.

If so, it cannot be purely accidental that as MaxRavitzer went from farm to farm in Sweden with theadopted German daughters who bore his name, and KnudChristiansen wandered across Europe with his familyin their VW bus, a young boy named Nordrup alsobecame a refugee, left homeless by the Chineseinvasion of Tibet. Winding up in a refugee camp inNepal, he made his way to an English school inIndia, where he was discovered by the Karmapa Lama,the head of what is often defined as thesecond-holiest lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. It wasthe Karmapa’s understanding that the boy would serveas a bridge between the teachings of TibetanBuddhism and the new worlds of the West, into whichboth he and the Karmapa had been thrown. It alsoseems natural, in the context of this story aboutrefugees, that Nordrup would meet and marry KnudChristiansen’s youngest daughter, Marianne.

Though the two are now divorced, in part due to apunishing schedule that kept Nordrup on the road 10or 11 months a year, they remain on good terms. Wemet at Marianne’s apartment on the Upper East Sideof Manhattan, where Knud Christiansen spent the lastmonths of his life. Unusually tall for hisgeneration of Tibetans, Nordrup has the chiseled,ageless features of people who live in highmountains. “I am actually three years younger than Iam,” he says, when I ask him his age. His birthcertificate, which he acquired in a refugee camp inIndia, states that he was born in 1956, though hecould easily pass for a man of 45 or so.

I tell Nordrup about first seeing Knud in the clockshop, and how he came to occupy my imagination. “Howyou begin is very fascinating for me,” Nordrupanswers, “because we say in the Buddhist view, thereason anything and everything could happen at allis because everything occurs interdependently.”

Nordrup was born, he tells me, in 1953, in WesternTibet, on the highest plateau in the world, which inTibetan is called Jokhang. His birthplace was a tentmade of yak hair located somewhere near Mt. Kailash,which is sacred to both Buddhists and Hindus. NearbyMt. Kailash is a lake. Because his parents werenomads, they moved up and down the slopes of themountains, depending on the season, to find pasturefor their flocks, which included sheep, goats, andyak, which are the male of the species; a female yakis called “dri.”

Pictures of eastern Tibet, both in the memories ofrefugees and in real life, are incredibly beautiful,filled with lush grass pastures and fields full offlowers. Western Tibet, in Nordrup’s memory, wasnothing like that, with no trees and very littlenatural vegetation. “All the sheep and yaks havesuch a difficult time you know?” he recalls. “Butonce in a while in the summer, if you go down to thewetlands, there’s some beautiful flowers growing.It’s like a paradise.” As a child, he rememberspoking the ground with a deer horn or a strong stickfor a kind of miniature sweet potato that wascollected by the mountain mice to sustain themselvesduring the winter.

The encroachment of the Chinese army on theterritory of the Tibetan nomads happened by degreesafter the People’s Liberation Army’s occupation ofLhasa. But even in the absence of soldiers, rumorsof Chinese hostility to Tibetan culture werepowerful enough to prompt the nomads to flee. “Whatprompted my father to leave everything behind wasthe idea that children are being taken away fromtheir family,” he remembered. Tibetan children werebeing taken to Beijing, where they were re-educatedto speak only Chinese, the nomads believed. “I hearthat, okay, if there is a sister and a brother,people said, 30 years later, they meet and will notrecognize each other,” Nordrup recalled. “Maybe theyget married, you know?”

It was perhaps two years after the Dalai Lama’sflight from Tibet to Nepal that Chinese soldiersmade their way to Nordrup’s father’s tent. Whatstruck him first about the soldiers was theirimpiety. “Tibetans, whether you are well-versed init or not, being religious is in their blood,” heexplains. “I’m not light-headed, you know? I don’tsee rainbows all the time. I don’t see auras. Buteven now people go there, and they say, ‘Oh there’ssomething so magical about the land.’ I guess onething is because of the altitude. That moonless,starless night, it’s so clear. And when you go andherd sheep, you sing.” It’s a beautiful picture thatNordrup is painting: One shepherd sings a song, andthen a nearby shepherd picks it up. They can go backand forth all night, inventing extemporaneous songsand imbuing the mountains with what the nomadsrecognized as the same holiness that they kept intheir portable dwellings, in sacred lamps and familyshrines.

The Chinese soldiers who came to his father’s tentshowed little understanding of or sympathy for suchreverence, or for the objects the nomads heldsacred. “The soldiers, when they come, the firstthing they ask is, ‘Can I touch them?’” Nordruprecalled. “Then they throw something. You know, solike, I don’t worship this. I was like, ‘Woah, man.The first thing is you go there, and then you, like,take our heart apart?’”

The desecration of sacred objects struck theTibetans like a slap in the face, while alsosuggesting that the direst rumors about Chineseintentions were probably true. “My father figuredout that if we left in the night, by dawn we will beat the Nepal-Tibet border,” Nordrup recalls. Heremembers seeing the silhouettes of his parents andtheir relatives inside the yak-hair tent, debatingtheir course of action. In the end it was decidedthat they would take two horses along with theirfamily shrine, and leave everything else behind. Hismother and older brother went together, whileNordrup went with his father. “Sometimes he carriedme on his back. Sometimes he dragged me,” herecalls. “He told me, ‘If you make noise, they’regoing to kill you.’”

At some point in their terrifying night journeyacross the gorge that separated Tibet from Nepal,Nordrup recalled, his horse fell. His father warnedhim again not to move, talk, or cry. “Now you areafraid and you cannot make noise,” he recalled, inthe same tone that Torben Ulrich used to recall hisown initiation into the society of hunted children.“Then, I heard gunshots,” he said. “And I startedscreaming. And my father just left the horse there,with the shrine, and he carried me on his backacross the gorge.”

It was from this moment of exile onward that Nordrupbegan to live the truth of Buddhist teaching. “InBuddhism,” he told me, “everything is transient.Everything is impermanent. Everything is relativelytrue. And obviously of course, I don’t have anytraining or anything like that, especially in thosedays. But here you know, the night before, we hadour country and we had our possessions—and in themorning, we had nothing.”

Arriving in Mustang, Nepal, the family were nolonger nomads with flocks that they moved to andfrom the high pastures. Now they were refugees,subsisting on charity. “We go begging door to door,”he recalled. “We’d say, ‘Give some food, give somerice, give some tea.’” From Mustang, they made theirway in 1961 to Pokhara, where the Swiss and theAmericans provided aid for Tibetan refugees. In therefugee camp, they lived three or four families to ahut, in spaces separated by partitions.

Nordrup’s father was not content with a life as arefugee. He decided to uproot his family for asecond time, after disguising himself and his wifeby cutting off their traditional long braids, andenter India, to be near the Dalai Lama. “You know,Dharamsala is situated surrounded by mountains, snowmountains,” the translator recalled. “There is along-life prayer of the Dalai Lama, which speaks ofthe celestial palace surrounded by the snowmountains. Dharamsala is a little bit like that.”

There, thanks to the birth certificate that gave hisage as three years younger than his actual likelyage, Nordrup was able to gain admission to theChildren’s Collection Center, where he repeatedlycontracted conjunctivitis while living intriple-decker bunk beds. From there, he was selectedto go to an English boarding school in the hillstation of Mussoorie, and from there, to a largerboarding school called Cambrian Hall. Still, hecould not forget that his parents were living in atattered tent in a refugee camp and working on theroads. “Sometimes I’m having lunch, and the foodwon’t go down. I wonder what my parents are eating,you know,” he recalled. “If it rains a lot, Ithought, you know, ‘I have to share this with them.’So I’d go in the rain and get soaked.”

His devotions did not go unnoticed. While attendinga ceremony for the Dalai Lama, Nordrup met anelderly lama who was acquainted with his family’sbackground and affiliation within the lineages ofTibetan Buddhism. “He said, ‘Oh, after this ceremonyI am going to Sikkim, to the Rumtek Monastery, tosee Karmapa, you know how incredible he is.’” TheKarmapa’s holiness was so acute, the monk explained,that even Westerners were drawn to him. What wasrequired was the work of translation between theKarmapa and his Western visitors, whom the monkdefined as “inhuman humans, blond and blue-eyed wildcreatures.”

Nordrup did not immediately see himself as suited tothe holy work that the monk proposed. “First, myTibetan is not good,” Nordrup explained. Having ayoung Western Tibetan nomad translate the elevatedlanguage of the Karmapa for foreigners would besomething like having a Cockney translate for anOxford don. “Tibetan language is very, verydifficult,” he continued. “Just the spoken languageis like two languages. The respectful and honorific,and the ordinary. From your head down to your toe,each organ has two different words. There are twodifferent words for teeth, nails, fingers. There isno association between them.” Yet, in those days, aTibetan who spoke reasonably fluent English was arare enough find for the exiled spiritual elite notto be picky. “A few months later,” Nordrupremembers, with pride, “I receive a letter from the16th Karmapa. And he said, ‘The old Lama came to me,and he mentioned you. I looked into it. And you canbe of service.’”

In 1977, the Tibetan Buddhist leader assignedNordrup the work of translating for the Karmapa’sown teacher, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, who would helpintroduce Tibetan Buddhism to America. Nordruparrived in New York on Aug. 5, 1977, from theKarmapa’s monastery in Sikkim without a telephonenumber or a place to live. All he had in his pocketwas the address of Bhutan’s mission to the UnitedNations, which was located on West End Avenue and84th Street, and doubled as a Buddhist center.

Knowing no one in New York, Nordrup walked over toRiverside Park, where he saw old people sitting onpark benches, with no children or relatives aroundthem. The sight struck him with a devastatingemotional force. “I’d heard of it, you know,” herecalled. “I’d never seen it. You know, how many oldpeople are in the West, so lonely, looking fearful.”The old people sitting alone on benches also madehim think of his own parents whom he’d left behindin India. “I was crying and I was saying, ‘Oh, mymother, we are oceans apart.’”

It was in this frame of mind that the young Tibetantranslator sent by the Karmapa encountered JytteMarstrand, a regular at the Buddhist Center, whoinvited him to spend Christmas in Calgary with theChristiansens and Maurice Strong, a Canadian oil andmining magnate who was a protégé of Canada’sinternationalist Prime Minister Lester Pearson, whobecame under-secretary general of the UnitedNations. Arriving in Calgary, Nordrup was amazed bythe blankets of unspoiled snow, and by the luxury ofthe Strong ranch, where he met Tibetans, NativeAmerican leaders, and other indigenousrepresentatives of the new movement to save theearth, which would become incarnated in the nextyear in the Manitou Foundation, a joint venture ofthe Strongs, Laurence and Mary Rockefeller, and theKarmapa. The U.N. official’s ambition to alter humanconsciousness to be more aware of theinterconnectedness of all things made sense toNordrup. He was also pleased to meet Marianne, whohad converted to Buddhism at the age of 16 beforebecoming an avid follower of the musician DavidBowie and of the Karmapa. Plus, there were earthlydelights to be sampled. “For me, the most magicalthing was so much food,” Nordrup remembers. “I meanbreakfast and lunch and dinner, and on top of that,everything in the fridge is yours.”

Knud’s common touch appealed to the nomad fromWestern Tibet. “I think Marianne can tell you this,he was a lot like my own father,” he recalls. “Hehad this free spirit thing about him.” The Tibetans,for whom common sense was understood as a practicalexpression of Buddhist teaching, appreciated thedown-to-earth ways in which Knud negotiated 1970sNew York. “He was a hustler,” Nordrup recalled,“trying to make ends meet in interesting ways. Hewas a little bit of a con artist.” He recalls with akind of mischievous appreciation the way Knud wouldcharge his clientele of rich older ladies forrepairing their clocks. “The clock has been lonely,”he said, imitating Knud. “You have to touch it andgive it a little love.” The bill for properly lovinga clock? $150.

The city to which Knud and his family arrived in1971 bore very little resemblance to the gleamingemblem of midcentury American prosperity that NewYork had been 20 years earlier, or to the sanitizedduty-free space that it later became. For those ofus who grew up in New York then, the city was a grimand dirty place in which frightened adults fought adesperate spiral of bankruptcy, crime, drug abuse,and middle-class flight. Adults and children alikewere afraid to ride the subways. At the same time,the feral rot fed new generations of artists, newimmigrants, and other formerly marginal arrivals whoreshaped the city’s art, music, and literature.Failing schools that could no longer provide musicalinstruments to their students became incubators forhip-hop. Downtown clubs like CBGB birthed PattiSmith and the Ramones. Writers like Saul Bellow andPaul Auster and painters like Keith Haring andJean-Michel Basquiat made lasting art out of thecity’s decay.

In addition to ambulance sirens, the blare ofboomboxes, and the rattle of the city’sgraffiti-covered subways, the soundtrack for thecity’s air of Weimar-like experimentation and decayduring the early 1970s was provided by its radiostations, including WBAI. Part of the Pacifica RadioNetwork, WBAI was home for the best jazz and stonedconversation, which at its best circled aroundlooking for an escape from the rotted carcass of thesixties left. It was also home to mystics, seekers,and psychonauts who defied any easy categorization.

Among the weirdos, freaks, and seekers who populatedthe fringes of the city’s airwaves was a man namedLex Hixon, who went to Yale and Columbia beforebecoming a Sufi and establishing a kind of urbanreligious community in an apartment building in theBronx. It was Hixon’s belief that all the world’sgreat religions were true; he claimed to be anorthodox believer in five different spiritualtraditions. On his radio show “In the Spirit,” whichaired on the Pacifica Network between 1971 and 1984,Hixon treated listeners to interviews with leadingBuddhist teachers like the Dalai Lama and theKarmapa, interspersed with otherworldly thoughtslike, “We know the precise way to go through death,which is millions of times more sophisticated thansending a rocket through a window of opportunity toreach Mars.”

While not formally residents of Hixon’s woozy urbancommune, the Christiansen daughters were drawnthere. “It was maybe 15 people taking refuge,” Jytterecalled of Lex Hixon’s commune, soundingretrospectively bemused. “They cut a little bit ofyour hair, like a little haircutting ceremony with a‘You repeat after me’ kind of thing. Then, they giveyou a Buddhist name. Mine was ‘The SteadfastWoman.’” Marianne, who spent time in the commune,also occupied herself with taking rooftoppunk-glamor shots of two young musician friends,Chris Stein and Debbie Harry, who were setting a newstyle for New York’s downtown music scene under thename Blondie.

Meanwhile, Hanne, the sister who had been blown outof her baby carriage in Copenhagen during the Naziinvasion, eventually fell in love with and marriedMaurice Strong. At his job at the United Nations,Strong—partly under the influence of Hanne and hersisters—gave earthly form to the Buddhist idea ofall things being connected by setting up the firstglobal climate conference in Stockholm in 1972. TheStockholm conference led to the establishment of theUnited Nations Environment Programme, the firstinternational environmental agency or body, led byStrong, who would then go on to plan the 1992 RioEarth Summit and have a significant influence overAl Gore, who became vice president of the UnitedStates and the leading American voice of thestill-nascent climate change movement.

Karen, Hanne’s mother, would prove to have been wellprepared for a life as a high-powered global hostessby her years in the resistance, re-organizing Danishintelligence, and wandering the world with Knud.“After a while, Maurice became totally dependent onher for all of his entertaining,” Hanne rememberedwith a laugh. “We had this flat on 74th andBroadway, and we would have Jacques Cousteau onenight and people from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, from allover the world. He would have his dinner partiesthere and she would arrange all of them. So, all ofa sudden, she was a very important person in hislife, and people were like flabbergasted with thefood they got. It was the big talk of the U.N.—‘Oh,do you want to get an invitation to this one!’”

Knud, Hanne remembers, was not as enamored of hisson-in-law. “Because Maurice had to be in totalcontrol,” she told me, of her husband. “He directseverything.”

The ties between the Strongs and the Karmapa werecemented by Jytte. “I was in Calgary at the time,staying in an apartment in Alberta, and on theweekends, we’d be out on Hanne and Maurice’s ranch,”Jytte remembered. It was there that she met BernardBenson, the ballistics expert, who connected theStrongs with the Karmapa. “He said, ‘Oh, come to mychateau in France. I’m building an institute forBuddhist studies,’” Jytte recalled. “I said, ‘Well,why are you doing that?’ He said, ‘Well, because I’man inventor and I invented … a missile that’s verydestructive.’”

A Pynchon character written by P.G. Wodehouse,Benson was a brilliant English eccentric who movedto Southern California and helped invent theguidance systems for the first generations ofintercontinental ballistic missiles. When he tiredof that work, he moved to the South of France, wherehe drove his Rolls-Royce barefoot and housed Tibetanlamas while maintaining contacts with British andAmerican intelligence. While staying with Benson,Jytte’s son Eric became enamored of the Tibetans,who taught him the Tibetan language, trained him asa translator, and finally took him into theirmonastery at the age of 11.

The Tibetans lived simply, but they also appreciatedthe conveniences of life on Strong’s ranch. When theKarmapa arrived at the ranch with 14 monks, Knuddrove them around, while Karen cooked with the helpof Tibetan assistants. “We had a very old pickuptruck, very simple and stark with a plain dashboard,but it ran like a charm when you put your foot tothe pedal,” Karen recalled. “Somehow the lamasdiscovered this truck and got ahold of the key. Allday long, monks would take turns driving this pickupdown the long dirt road leading to the main road andthen back again to the big log house on the hill. Itgave them endless pleasure to drive this truck, andif we were looking for the key we had to go to thesecond-highest monk who kept it in his shirt pocketunder his upper robe.”

Dear Marianne and everyone and Paul,

Jytte has probably told you about the meetingwith the Buddha who was dressed like Paul (inmaroon robes) and I was blessed first. I thinkHanne was a little upset because he took me inalone and the first time while several hundredpeople waited outside. I had requested Jytte andHanne not to say who I was but he recognized mebefore I even came in. We drank tea together andexchanged stories. He called me his father, inseriousness—so Karmapa is your brother …

The third time that same day I was almostcarried in, brought before the throne of thenext highest lama [this was the previous JamgonKongtrul Rinpoche] on a smaller throne and allthe monks began to sing and say prayers. I hadto repeat all the words that Karmapa said andeat some rice with him and after that a monkcame and gave me my birth certificate and I am aBuddhist and my name is Karma Gyurmed Dhorjetranslated at Unchanging Vajra (indestructible)…

love to everyone, Far

***

Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, the famed Buddhist teacherfor whom Nordrup translated most of his life, andwho introduced Knud to the Karmapa, lived until hisrecent death at a retreat center near Delhi, NewYork. There, he recalled for me his flight from thePeople’s Liberation Army as it swept through Kham,in eastern Tibet, through Central Tibet. “There wereactually Tibetan soldiers at the time that wereprotecting Tibetans who were fleeing their homes.And they risked their lives to protect peopleescaping that were traveling on the roads,” herecalled. “Most of them ended up dying because theywere trying to protect their own people.”

I have a question that’s been puzzling me, I toldhim. I’ve spent the past few years talking to peoplewho have taken extraordinary risks to help others,yet if you ask them why, they don’t really have ananswer. They say, well of course that’s what I did.

Does a Buddhist teacher understand it as a virtuenot to be able to bear the suffering of others?

There are two different kinds of people, Rinpocheresponded. One kind sees the suffering of others andneeds to actively do something to relieve them oftheir suffering. They will go ahead and do somethingfor others even at the expense of their own lives.Those people are courageous, he explains. “But thereare others, they are equally unable to bear thesuffering of others, but they do nothing, or elsethey become very afraid themselves.”

When I ask, he explains the distinction further. “Ittakes some wisdom and insight to be able to actuallyhelp others, even if you have the courage,” he says.“You also have to choose the right kind of action tobe effective.”

Knud Christiansen, he says, was the kind of personwho acted effectively to reduce suffering. “When hetalked, everybody would laugh and have a good time,”he said with a smile. “He was like an ordinaryTibetan. That’s the way I remember him.”

* * *

In his old age, Knud Christiansen walked throughCentral Park every morning, including on weekends,an older man with a well-cut white beard and anelegant silver-tipped cane, dressed in a suit or along coat and a dress hat. Entering the park on West72nd Street, he crossed Sheep’s Meadow and came outat 61st Street and Fifth Avenue and made his way tohis place of business. He cut a grand-lookingfigure, though very few people who crossed his pathcould have said who he was. An experiencedhorse-carriage driver, whose tourist routeintersected with Knud’s daily perambulations,delighted in letting his customers in on the oldman’s secret, Marianne recalled. “Look,” he toldthem with a knowing wink, “there goes Alec Guinness,the actor from Star Wars.”

When he reached his early nineties, Knud left theclock shop and started looking for a new job. Oneidea he proposed was that he sit on a bench inCentral Park with a sign reading “eccentricscientist” while his granddaughter K., Marianne’sdaughter with Nordrup, played her guitar. He askedone of his three daughters to buy him a Brioni suitso that he could hire himself out for soirées as thehost’s interesting uncle, but gave up on the ideawhen he found out that the price of such a suitcould easily reach five figures. A custom Englishmorning suit would be a better value, he decided,considering that he could also be buried in it.

In New York, I had coffee one autumn afternoon withNordrup and K., who had been through a difficulttime; her husband was recently held as a prisoner inhis country, where his confinement involveddeprivation and torture. He was only recentlyreleased.

A half-Danish, half-Tibetan musician, K. isbeautiful, inward and shy, yet self-possessed andextremely clear in her thinking and speech. She grewup as a child in the Karmapa’s monastery inWoodstock, where she lived with her mother while herfather translated for Rinpoche. As she describes it,hers was an emotionally rich and intense childhood.“There was a hill going up to the monastery, that Iremember being really huge, and when I went thererecently it was just like a little nothing,” shesaid with a laugh. “The head lama, the abbot, waslike a grandfather to me.” At the monastery, K. hada cat named Charlotte whom she found in the rain.Once, she stole $5 from a donation basket and hid itin her shoe. “I can’t even tell you how manythousands of hours of teachings on the idea that weare all inherently Buddhas that I’ve heard,” shesaid. “Because of going through something reallyrough in my own life I have come to this thoughtalso, which is that I think that there are peoplewho are just selfish and ignorant. I think that it’sthe majority of people.”

Growing up, K. was also very close to hergrandfather, who incarnated what she sees as thegood in Buddhist thought. On her visits to the citywith her mother, Knud would take her to a magicshop, where he would buy her pepper gum and whoopiecushions and a collar with a straight leash attachedthat allowed her to pretend that she was walking aninvisible dog. “You realize that brewing a cup oftea or just watching a bird, you think, ‘My god,life is actually miraculous,’” she said. “I thinkthat he lived in that magical world. Which is thereal world.”

“My grandfather once told me the story of a friendof his, that was the night before the Danes hadplanned to basically take all the Jewish citizensand ship them to camps,” she remembers. “I thoughtabout death all the time and that I had some kind ofwindow into the futility but also the immenselycruel joke that life was, and how stuck we were inhaving to care and be here, and then to die andsuffer.”

When Knud was dying, K. helped supervise his hospicecare in Marianne’s apartment. “We called them theangel brigade,” she recalls. “There would be oneJapanese man who would show my grandfather picturesof gardens, and my grandfather at the time had touse a magnifying glass to look at things, and it hada light on it, you know, so he would like look at apicture of a garden path and be like, ‘Oh this isbeautiful.’ And then another woman is sitting downasking my mom, ‘So how is he, is he eating,’ andsomebody else is taking notes, but there was thissense of transition, of not struggling and beingloved. She said he was like a Viking or like aking.”

“I don’t know why,” she continued, “but the otherday I started to write this song, and I had a fullday of just crying and singing to him and thinkingof him and really grieving. And my mom still, shecan’t listen to the song.”

* * *

When I met with Hanne Strong in Toronto, I wasstruck by her lack of praise for the Danish people,and their conduct during the war, and was interestedto understand how she sees their failings. “Veryself-satisfied, which is their downfall,” sheexplained. “In Buddhism, you’ll see that you canreach a high level, but then if you have pride, orself-satisfaction, you don’t reach the top level.”

I tell her about seeing the wordYahweh carved in Hebrew in a churchyard inCopenhagen. When I saw it, I tell Hanne, it occurredto me that Danes saw Jews as their fellow men. Itwas part of their mental equipment. It wasn’t a bigpart, but important enough to be engraved on thewalls of their churches. Hanne shrugs.

So, you don’t want me to tell Danes the story of howgood and wonderful they were, because it wouldincrease their pride? I ask her.

“It’s a smugness,” she corrects me. “Which is evenworse.”

We move on to a long discussion of karma, which canbe understood as the idea that all things areconnected, or as a natural process of retribution orpayback for both the good and bad one does in life.“One of my thoughts about karma,” she told me, “andit could be more than a thought—is that all the Jewsthat were sent to gas chambers were all the peopledown through history in Europe that haddiscriminated against Jews. They came back as Jews,to face the music.”

I am startled by the idea. There’s somethingobviously repellant about the idea of the Holocaustas an exercise in negative karma, in which thepunishment for the cruelty of antisemites wascollectively visited upon the innocent bodies ofJews, including one and a half million Jewishchildren. If anyone was ever innocent of causingsuffering on earth, it was the children who died inthe gas chambers of Auschwitz. Yet for someone whoneeds to explain why evil exists in the world, karmais perhaps only answer that makes sense. We sufferon earth for sins committed in previous lives thatwe are still accountable for, while striving to bebetter. Yet I can’t get around the fact that Hanne’sanswer holds the victims of history’s worst crimeresponsible for their own torture and slaughter.

My own problem with Hanne’s answer—which can be readin some ways as a universalist version of theexceptionally problematic yet searing explanation ofthe Holocaust given by Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner, thesenior Rosh Yeshiva at Chaim Berlin and perhaps thegreatest Talmudic authority to teach on Americansoil—is more basic. Having reported off and on inwar zones over three decades, I have neverquestioned the existence of evil in God’s universe.You can see it everywhere. A more profound questionfor me has always been the question of why peopleare good. When I am tempted to think about humanityin the abstract, I see a filament of light that runsthrough a vast expanse of darkness.

“That was my father,” she says flatly. “He was justpure good. And his mother was pure good. And mymother was. But the thing is, when you look athumanity, ninety percent of it is rotten.”

My journey to unravel the mystery of Knud’s lifeended in a shipyard town in New Hampshire, 30 yearsafter I first visited his clock shop. There, Ilocated an unremarkable-looking house, where I rangthe doorbell and was greeted by one of the firstTibetan lamas reincarnated in North America. He hasfair skin, and the weather-smoothed face of anoutdoorsman, minus the usual wrinkles—a beatificlook that would not look out of place in amonastery, through it is hard to imagine him sittingstill for very long. He dresses like a shipyardworker, which he was for over a decade. Still, hispresence hums with a unique energy, which seemsoddly peaceful even while he jumps from subject tosubject; it’s like meeting a Buddhist monk with ADD.

Jason, who is Knud Christiansen’s great grandson,was recognized as a reincarnated lama at the age of2 by the 16th Karmapa, when Jason’s grandmother,Hanne, was visiting the Karmapa in Rumtek. “Iremember doing a test,” Jason recalls. “When Ivisited the Woodstock Monastery at age 5, I ran in,and took my shoes off, and went and sat with themonks for 20 minutes. I was a wild child. Didn’tlisten well, had a lot of energy. I ran in there,and took my shoes off, I knew to do that, went in,sat in lotus position, and meditated with them for ahalf hour, I didn’t make a sound. They asked mequestions where they had things on the table, likefrom past lifetimes.” Jason was recognized as thecorporeal vessel for the reincarnated spirit ofRechung Dorje Drakpa, one of the two main disciplesof the great 12th-century Tibetan Buddhist teacherMilarepa.

Jason’s secret life remains a secret to everyoneoutside of his lineage and his family in partbecause his father, who grew up in this town, wasnever particularly enthusiastic about the idea thathis son was a reincarnated 12th-century Tibetanmonk. Also, Jason preferred living with his fatherover his mother, an international businesswoman whotraveled a lot. “My mom was in a very developmentalphase in her life,” he recalled. “I moved back withmy dad because my father was my rock. My father grewup here in New Hampshire. He protected me the way heknew how, from something he was unsure about andwhich made him afraid.”

As a child, Jason raced motocross bikes with hisfather while communicating privately with the monkswho supervised his spiritual education, like acharacter in a Salinger story set in the 1980s. Theolder lamas, he said, explained to him from an earlyage that his path was one that the universerequired. When he came of age, he journeyed to hismonastery in Tibet, where people lined remotemountain roads to see him, and pay homage. “An oldlady waited for me, and I showed up in this littlevillage,” he said, showing me pictures of hisjourney. “And she wanted me to hold her and sayprayers, and she died in my arms. Waiting to see me.That was heavy.”

Good actions, however unlikely, can initiatea cycle of goodness, by sending thefly-wheel of one man’s life, and thenanother, spinning in the same direction.

I have made my own pilgrimage here to see him, Iexplain, to talk about his great grandfather. “I was12 when my parents got divorced, we lived inColorado,” he remembers. He recalls Knud, hisgrandmother’s father, coming to visit. They evencaught a fish together. “He was introverted as aperson, and just gracious and very kind.”

The idea of keeping secrets over the course of alifetime makes sense to Jason. The monks taught himthat keeping secrets could be a way of safeguardingthe teachings that he was chosen to pass on. “I havehidden this because I have a very strong connectionto it and I don’t want to share it with people,especially people that don’t understand. I knowyou’re familiar enough as a worldly person, and Iknow you’ve met with Karmapa,” he explained. “Butonce that lightbulb goes on and you get thefundamentals it’s a very simple instruction: Bekind, be compassionate. Realize your mind, liberateyourself so you can help as many people as you canon earth.”

When I ask him what percentage of people walkingaround in the world one might expect to encountersuch compassion from, he smiles. “Generallyspeaking, walking around Maine and New Hampshire andMassachusetts,” he answers, “I’d say probably 1 in20.”

Showing compassion toward others has an effect onthe universe, and it also has an effect on you.“That’s karma,” Jason explained. “The simplestdefinition of karma is one that I heard from a yogi:You do good, you get good. You do bad, you get bad.”

Seated in his modest living room, whose oneout-of-the-ordinary touch is a large tank oftropical fish adorned with an ancient carving of theBuddha, he pauses, and seems to draw into himself. Itell him the story of having first met hisgrandfather in his clock shop, and how I can stillremember the smell of his pipe tobacco.

“I can still smell the pipe too,” Jason said. Thenhe turns serious again. “You had no clue when youmet him, but you knew something. That wascompassion, which allowed you to connect to thecompassion in him,” he said. “I remember him tellingme that he wondered if he would die all the time inthat boat, when he was saving people and bringingthem to Sweden from Denmark.”

My grandfather, who lived through large-scalehorrors of the Bolshevik Revolution before escapingfrom Russia prior to the Nazi onslaught that killedevery other living member of his family, taught methese same lessons, I tell Jason. Having spent timewith people who were routinely violent, I have foundthat the lessons my grandfather taught me abouthuman goodness, and the interconnection of allthings, are in no way negated by the fact that humannature is a dark forest. It was the light thatinterested him. What is important for me to know wasthat my grandfather’s life had been saved byothers—without whom his beloved family, hischildren, and grandchildren, not one of us, wouldexist in the world. Good actions, however unlikely,can initiate a cycle of goodness, by sending theflywheel of one man’s life, and then another,spinning in the same direction. Jason nods.

The Sutton Clock Shop lived on after Knud’s death.Relocated to 82nd Street, it is run by Sebastian,Knud’s stepson from his last marriage, after Knudand Karen divorced in 1974. (Knud loved New YorkCity; Karen strongly preferred the countryside andbeing a hostess for Hanne and Maurice; she wanted tospend time in Denmark; he refused to go back. Theyremained good friends. He never lacked for femalecompany.) I am surprised, though I should not be bynow, to find that Sebastian is black, and that hisdaughter Isabella is Jewish and speaks Hebrew.

Sebastian, unlike his stepfather, is an actualclockmaker. Sitting at his illuminated workbench, heworks patiently on the inner mechanisms of themachines that his father bequeathed to him. Behindhim, the clock faces on the wall illustratedifferent ideas of time, some somber and stark,others decorative and fanciful.

In a white Oxford button-down with the sleevesrolled up and black-framed glasses, Sebastian has anatty Old World New Craftsman-type presence. Deep inthe clock shop, a bell sounds, signaling thatsomewhere, it is something o’clock. All around usare sounds that suggest the passing of time, atoo-fast tick-tick, a watery metronome, a pumpingsound, the saw-saw of a flywheel moving back andforth. A scale chimes, followed by a ringing bell.The way the sounds overlap in the basement spacefeels oddly comforting. Something is alwayshappening, weaving you deeper into the fabric ofsound, whose underlying structure is time’s arrow,which is God, yet at the same time an illusion.Sebastian winds the clock he is working on, until itreleases a deep noon-time gong.

Picking up a pair of tweezers, he works on the frontof the clock while adjusting a piece in the back.“There’s some that sound a little tinny,” he tellsme. “But it all becomes part of the chatter of theshop.”

He will let the clock hang overnight, he says. Inthe morning, he will check it again to see if it isstill working. His daughter also loves the clockshop, he tells me. It is his hope that someday shewill inherit it.

David Samuels is a writer who lives in upstate NewYork.

Illustration byPatrik Svensson. Layout and design byAustin Maurer.