Surprises in a Chapel

Our trip to Denmark was full of surprises. The chapel in Fredicksborg, Christian IV’s summer palace, surprised me with its high baroque decor. Life-size statues of half-naked nymphs popped out of curling scrolls on the ceiling. Wally and I had a close-up view from the balcony which looped above the nave. I could almost reach over the railing and touch one of those big, full breasts.

The Danes have a casual attitude toward religion. There was nothing Christian about Christian’s church.

Wally and I tore our eyes away from this Baroque extravaganza and turned around to look at rows and rows of little shields. When Christian IV came home from visiting his sister Anne and her husband James I in England, he established the Order of the Elephant, the Danish version of England’s Order of the Garter. This chapel was the counterpart of the Garter Chapel at Windsor.

Wally and I walked all around the balcony looking at shields with coats of arms for each knight awarded the Order of the Elephant from the beginning to the present day. I stopped, surprised by a shield emblazoned with the Nazi Swastika.

A guard was standing nearby. I greeted him in Danish and, gesturing toward the hated Nazi symbol, asked, “Why this?” In English he said, “The German Commandant during World War II,”

“The King gave him the Order of the Elephant?” I said, giving up on trying to speak Danish. I’d heard that King Frederick protested against an Nazi order for all Jews to wear the Star of David by coming out of his palace and walking about Copenhagen with the Star of David on his jacket.

“Because of the Jews,” the guard said. He explained, in English and Danish, with hand gestures. The Nazi ordered the Germans patrolling the Sound between Denmark and Sweden that when they heard little boats, they were to aim their guns high. “The commandant’s order allowed our Jews to go to neutral Sweden. If he had not given that order, none of our Jews would have escaped.”

Of the thousands of Jews living in Denmark before the German Occupation, only a few were caught and sent to Nazi death camps.

Then he asked me, “How did you learn Danish?” (Very few Americans speak Danish. Wally, all of whose ancestors came from Denmark, could not even pronounce his name in Danish.”
“From records,” I said, turning my hand like a disk on a record player.
“I try to learn Japanese,” he said. “I have a book, but it is difficult.”
“Try to get some records,” I said. “The records help, but I still wish I could speak Danish better.”
“Denmark is a small country,” he said. “We have many Japanese tourists here. I want to help my country by greeting them in their own language. I want to help my country any way I can.”

People say to me, “I don’t need to travel. All I need to know I can learn in Texas.” I tell them, “Go to foreign countries. Talk to people. You’ll learn a lot that’s not in books or on television. In Denmark I was surprised by naked women on a church ceiling and by an English-speaking palace guard, who wanted to learn Japanese.”