Beethoven's Hair
An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and Scientific Mystery Solved
An excerpt from the book published by Broadway Books, Penguin Random House
Oh, it would be so lovely to live a thousand lives.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
from A Gift in Gilleleje
The cavernous Danish National Archives contain no evidence indicating that a German emigrant named Sophie Hiller or either of her two sons, Edgar or Erwin, were admitted to Denmark between 1934 and 1943. Neither do the archives contain a record establishing that Sophie’s stepson Felix Hiller was one of the thousands of German refugees who had passed through Danish immigration prior to the outbreak of the war. It is possible, of course, that one—or even all—of them were admitted under false identities. Hundreds of refugees present in Denmark in 1943 entered the country by clandestine means and without official sanction, and therefore no record of their presence has ever existed.
What is irrefutable, however, is that the lives of this single family steeped in music had been ruptured in a way that would have been utterly unimaginable as recently as 1934, the year in which Paul Hiller passed away. The available evidence makes it appear certain that none of the Hillers remained in Cologne in 1943, and the reappearance of the locket likewise makes it possible that at least one of them escaped to Denmark before the late-summer of that year, when the Nazis seized martial control of their occupied country and set about the scurrilous business of deporting Jews. But would Sophie, Edgar, or Erwin Hiller have been readily identifiable as Jewish in a country where that designation was deemed insignificant in comparison with the grave importance it had borne in neighboring Germany? Once in Denmark, would the Hillers have shunned their Jewish ethnicity as a further means of self-protection? Or conversely, might they have sought out that country’s small community of Jews as a way to draw vital assistance and support from others who similarly were hunted? Might a member of the Hiller family have been among the large crowd that had gathered at the venerable Copenhagen Synagogue on the morning of September 30, 1943 to hear Rabbi Marcus Melchior’s stunning announcement?
Last night I received word that tomorrow the Germans plan to raid Jewish homes throughout Copenhagen to arrest all the Danish Jews for shipment to concentration camps. They know that tomorrow is Rosh Hashanah and our families will be home. The situation is very serious. We must take action immediately. You must leave the synagogue now and contact all relatives, friends, and neighbors you know are Jewish and tell them what I have told you. You must tell them pass the word on to everyone they know is Jewish. You must also speak to all your Christian friends and tell them to warn the Jews. You must do this immediately, within the next few minutes, so that two or three hours from now everyone will know what is happening. By nightfall tonight, we must all be in hiding.
This extraordinary information had come to the rabbi from C.B. Henriques, a supreme court barrister and longtime leader of the Jewish community, who had received it from Social-Democratic party chief Hans Hedtoft, who, in turn, had been personally warned by German shipping attaché Georg Duckwitz that a Nazi aktion was imminent. Duckwitz first had risked arrest for treason on September 8 when he had attempted to intercept a telegram cabled to Berlin by his close friend Werner Best, the Nazi’s plenipotentiary in Denmark, in which Best had recommended to Hitler that now was the right time to deal decisively with the nation’s Jews. Duckwitz had failed in that endeavor, but when, ten days later, Hitler had ordered the abductions and deportations to commence on October 1, Duckwitz had been unable to stay silent. It had been solely his decision of conscience that had given members of the Jewish community the single day’s notice, during which time they had been able to hide or to flee, his decision alone that had mobilized the resistance movement and thousands of hitherto passive Danes. Before nightfall on September 30, a determined, if impromptu, nationwide effort to rescue Denmark’s Jews was underway.
Messengers immediately were mobilized in Copenhagen and smaller cities and towns to spread the critical word, volunteers knocking on every door they came to because theretofore there had been no general awareness in Denmark of who was Jewish and who was not. Lutheran ministers made urgent telephone pleas to their parishioners to shelter Jews however they could; resistance leaders began to marshal the aid of merchant fishermen whose boats could begin to ferry Jews to safety; boy scouts and members of hunting clubs combed woodlands in search of refugees who had sought the limited cover of trees, attempting to direct them to harbor towns where boats might await them; everywhere hospitals suddenly were filled to overflowing with patients whose names were listed as Hansen, Petersen, or Jensen, and as word reached the hospitals about families who were precariously hidden—or not hidden at all—ambulances quickly were dispatched to fetch them.
Taxis that otherwise would have been plying Copenhagen’s cobbled streets on an early autumn afternoon now sped through the quiet countryside en route to the fishing villages that ringed the øresund coast; and seaside trains, too, were packed as though the summer holiday season suddenly had recommenced, their hushed, grim-visaged passengers wearing as many clothes as they could fit beneath their heavy coats. Fishing ports like Rungsted, Humelbæk, Helsingør, Hornbæk, and Gilleleje began to swell with their new arrivals, townspeople opening their shops, their barns, attics, and living rooms to guests who had been utterly unexpected the day before.
Perhaps because it was farthest from Copenhagen and the perceived threat of the Gestapo, but also certainly because the train dead-ended there, the village of Gilleleje on the northern tip of Sjælland soon felt a particular surge of temporary inhabitants. On Tuesday, October 5—five days after the rescue effort had hastened to life—the evening train into Gilleleje carried 314 people instead of the three dozen it normally did, the Gilleleje stationmaster penciling the word “Jews” beside the number he scribbled in an effort to explain the flood of passengers. But these were not the first refugees to reach the town of 1,700 inhabitants; many had arrived in the preceding days and already had boarded fishing boats docked in Gilleleje’s small harbor and safely crossed to the port of Höganäs in neutral Sweden, a dozen nautical miles across the wind-chopped expanse where the narrow øresund met the open waters of the Kattegat Sea.
The first eight refugees—two families from Copenhagen who had not needed to wait for Rabbi Melchior’s urgent announcement to sense that flight from the Nazis was about to become their only option—had escaped across the sound in the early morning hours of Wednesday, September 29. Hidden by shopkeeper Tage Jacobsen and his wife, then ferried to Sweden by retired fisherman Niels Clausen, who had lost a leg and had not been to sea for several years, but who had agreed to transport them nonetheless, the four adults and four children had been interrogated by police in Höganäs on their arrival, then quartered in a boardinghouse.
By Friday, October 1, dozens more refugees had arrived in the village. The Gilleleje Inn had been filled, as had the Badehotel, despite the fact that its owners, townspeople said, were open about their pro-Nazi sentiments. So many people who plainly hailed from somewhere else had begun to walk the streets that nervous residents began to invite the strangers into their homes, and grocer Gilbert Lassen opened the summer houses for which he acted as caretaker to refugees as well, certain that their owners would approve of his largesse. Before long, frightened Jews anxious to flee Denmark, their names almost never mentioned to their hosts, had been sheltered virtually everywhere in and around the village—in garages and lofts, in sheds and warehouses, at the hospital, the boatbuilder’s yard, the waterworks, and the brewery.
Fishing cutters and oceangoing schooners from the large Gilleleje fleet had sailed unpredictably but often during the first days of the rescue. The passengers they took on board paid what they could for the short voyage to safety, the fisherman accepting payment simply because it had been irresistible not to demand it, but also because they had risked their boats, their livelihoods, even prison if they had been apprehended by the feared Gestapo. Knots of huddled refugees had waited at the docks for hours in open daylight in the beginning, then simply had walked on board a readied boat. But before long their swelling numbers, as well as the sheer numbers of embarkations, had necessitated that runs largely had been attempted late at night. The ships made the crossing without the benefit of lights, and soon thereafter departures from the harbor gave way to safer and more surreptitious launches from the beaches that lay east and west of town, a half-dozen refugees at a time loaded into dinghies in the seconds between the crash of each successive wave, then ferried out to the Maagen, the Tyborøn, the Haabet, the Fri, or the Wasa waiting in deep water.
Instead of setting a course due east to Höganäs, captains of the erstwhile fishing vessels had tended to sail north into the Kattegat as they departed the Danish coast, and only had steered eastward across the sound once they reached open water, where the likelihood of encountering German patrol boats had been even slimmer than it otherwise was. And once the trickle of refugees had reached a steady flow, the neutral Swedes—openly favoring the Allied powers now that Nazi military fortunes had begun to ebb dramatically—had done what they could to make the fishermen’s round-trip journeys simpler. Swedish naval vessels made rendezvous with the Danish ships a mile or two out from the welcoming coast, their human cargo transferred on narrow gangplanks from one wave-pitched ship to another before being delivered to the Swedish harbor.
But then on the morning of Wednesday, October 6, Gestapo chief Hans Juhl, based in the nearby port of Helsingør and sniffing trouble, declared all the harbors of north Sjælland off limits to anyone who did not possess a valid fisherman’s card; he instructed members of the Danish civilian coast-guard to monitor carefully all activity along the shore—although the guard’s allegiance to him was tenuous at best—and Juhl and his men began to make periodic raids on harbors and suspected hiding places in hopes of catching the Danes in what they perceived as blatant acts of sabotage—the secreting of hunted Jews out of Germany’s grasp.
Wednesday morning dawned dreary and overcast, a light rain continuing from the storm that had raged in the night, and a hard southeast wind still swept across the village’s thatched and tiled roofs, then out into a troubled sea. The more than three hundred refugees who had arrived by train the night before—together with those already in town but who had not yet found their way to Sweden—were dry and momentarily safe, at least, if not entirely comfortable in makeshift lodgings throughout Gilleleje and its surroundings. By the estimate of a group of townspeople meeting at first light at Oluf Olsen’s butcher shop, as many as five hundred Jews whose lives were in real peril were hidden at the moment. So many refugees had descended on Gilleleje that new locations in which they could hide were becoming distressingly scarce, and the local leaders spoke urgently about how best to deal with an increasingly grave situation. Should the refugees be moved far inland somehow? Should someone try to get word to resistance organizers in Copenhagen that Gilleleje already was packed to overflowing with people who could not sail to Sweden because the Gestapo had grown determined at last to stop them? Should the townspeople attempt to organize a single, large, but inherently very risky transport, boarding most—or even all—of the refugees onto one of the large ships that had sought shelter in the harbor during the long storm? Would the captain of one of those ships agree to the dramatic plan?
Grocer Gilbert Lassen attended the meeting at Olsen’s shop; so did fishmonger Juhl Jensen, high school teachers Assenchenfeldt Frederiksen and Mogens Schmidt, Pastor Kjeldgaard Jensen, and Christian Petersen, chairman of the parish council. At least six out-of-towners also were present: a man named Nielsen who sold insurance in nearby Hillerød; Niels Thorsen and Jean Fischer, resistance activists and students at Copenhagen’s Technical University; Arne Kleven, a star football player a few years before, now a union administrator, and writer for the underground newspaper Nordisk Front; as well as Henry Skjær, the renowned, 44-year old baritone from the Royal Danish Opera. Neither the well-known Kleven nor Skjær were Jewish and therefore their lives were not in danger, but they, like the students, had become very active in organizing the escape during the preceding week, and both had arrived in Gilleleje on the packed Tuesday evening train, together with hundreds of people in flight for whom they now had assumed more than tacit responsibility.
At the close of the early-morning meeting, the ad hoc rescue committee agreed that although the effort would entail serious risk, the option that made most sense was to arrange a large-scale transport and to do so as soon as possible. The students were charged with collecting money from the refugees to pay for their passage, and the teacher Schmidt volunteered to go to the harbor to convince the captain of at least one of the storm-sheltered ships that the bounty he would receive for a two-hour detour to Sweden would be well worth the short-term risk to his ship and crew. Although twenty vessels had anchored in the small harbor during the night storm, the only skipper whom Schmidt could find in the harbor area was Gunnar Flyvbjerg, captain of a large, family-owned schooner named the Flyvbjerg. But for the seductive fee of 50,000 Danish kroners, the captain and his mates readily agreed that they would make a single run to Höganäs, departing at one o’clock that afternoon. The hold of the Flyvbjerg was empty, and although its passengers could not be comfortably accommodated en route, many hundreds of refugees—perhaps even everyone in town who was desperate to go—could come aboard.
News of the impending transport spread immediately throughout the village, and in only an hour a worrisome number of refugees had began to gather openly along the docks at the harbor, anxious about how many people the schooner could carry, and eager to assure themselves of passage. The organizers had planned to escort people to the waiting ship only in small groups, but the rush of refugees to the harbor by late morning meant that scheme had to be abandoned before it even began. Instead, hundreds of people simply swarmed the harbor area by midday—men, women, and children of all ages bundled in heavy clothing, their faces etched with fear and uncertainty, many attempting to manage suitcases, trunks, and baby carriages. Townspeople gathered too, if for no other reason than that nothing like this ever had occurred in Gilleleje, and everyone—whether bound for Sweden or simply there to see the refugees on their way—knew that Gestapo Juhl and his men might arrive from Helsingør at any moment, trapping the Jews at the water’s edge before they could board and be gone.
At last people were allowed to begin making their way along a narrow breakwater to the place where the Flyvbjerg was moored, then to begin boarding. The crowd surged toward the stone jetty that would lead them out to the ship; people struggled to maintain their places in line; and although some were safely onboard after a time, the process was terribly slow. To the dismay of many, a fisherman began to try to direct the crowd, and when someone shouted, “Throw him in the harbor! He’s an agent!,” others misunderstood and began to scream, “The Gestapo! The Gestapo are coming.” In the seconds of panic that ensued the rumor soon seemed true, and even the Flyvbjerg’s captain quickly was convinced that the Nazis were bearing down on his ship. He started his schooner’s motors, pushed away the desperate people who still struggled to board, then cast off, passing beyond the encircling breakwaters in only a moment and heading out to sea, stranding hundreds on the jetty, hundreds more still on shore.
Although 182 refugees ultimately reached Sweden aboard the Flyvbjerg that day, perhaps 300 more did not. Despite the fact that the Gestapo had captured no one, the transport plan had failed. For the moment, at least, the hundreds of terrified, perplexed, and angry people—a few separated from family members who now were en route to Höganäs—were ushered inside the big repair shed that stood at the foot of the jetty, and a frenzied meeting soon was underway to try to determine what to do next. No one had been captured, but it now seemed clear that future embarkations as large as the one just attempted, whether disrupted by Nazis or not, surely would pose similar logistical problems. A carefully crafted strategy for getting small groups efficiently onto ships had to be devised, but in the meantime, the Jews simply had to be shrouded from sight.
A small group of refugees briefly had been held at the village church during the morning while they had waited to board the Flyvbjerg, and it seemed to make sense to hide a larger group there once again. In an empty loft above the nave, perhaps a hundred people could be concealed—for a long time, if necessity demanded—and before the meeting broke up, Arne Kleven, the union administrator and writer, agreed to escort a group of refugees to the church and lock himself inside with them in order to assure them that they would not be forgotten. It was a promise that was to become all too easy for him to keep.
During the Sunday morning service three days before, Reverend Kjeldgaard Jensen had read to his parishioners the pastoral letter that had been issued by the bishops of the Danish Lutheran church in response to the crisis. It was the duty of church members, the letter instructed, to protest against the persecution of Denmark’s Jews because Jesus had been a Jew, because persecution was contrary to his command to love one’s neighbors, and also simply because persecution “is contrary to the conception of justice that prevails in the Danish people.” Pastor Jensen himself had taken the letter very much to heart: he had joined the efforts of the ad hoc organizing committee; he had made the church and the parish hall readily available for the hiding of refugees; and then, late in the afternoon on Wednesday, October 6, he went to the church door, loudly spoke the word håbet, “hope,” the password that proved he was a friend, then was let inside by Arne Kleven. He climbed the steep and narrow stairs to the loft, then announced to the many people gathered there that as vicar of the sacred place where they now waited, he would protect each one of them with his life if called upon to do so.
The spirits of the people now sheltered in the loft had been crushed when the chaotic scene in the harbor stranded them on shore, the Flyvbjerg, some of their friends, even family members, embarking for Sweden without them. Many of them had spent all the money they possessed to secure passage on the Flyvbjerg, and despite assurances from townspeople that they would not be asked to pay again, they could not be entirely certain that that would be the case. They had been told as well that they would remain in the cold, dark, and airless loft only until townspeople could plan a way for them safely to board the Jan, another of the several schooners that had sought safety in the Gilleleje harbor the previous night, and whose captain also had agreed to transport refugees. This time, the plan was for the Jan to leave the harbor, then weigh anchor well offshore; small groups of refugees would be ferried out to the ship in dinghies in the dead of night from Smidstrup Strand, a secluded beach east of town. Kleven told the refugees that they would be transported that night, if possible. The organizers apologized for their discomfort, but they assured the huddled and desperate Jews—as Pastor Jensen had done—that they diligently would protect them until they were safely on Swedish soil.
In addition to the sixty or so anonymous people who had made their way to the loft from the harbor under Arne Kleven’s escort, another group of nameless refugees who had just arrived in the village now sought the shelter of the church as the dreary day gave way to night. Before leaving Copenhagen earlier in the afternoon and traveling in taxis and private cars to Gilleleje, Henry Skjær, the opera singer, somehow had gotten word to a group of fleeing Jews about the planned transport aboard the Jan, and had told them that they should seek shelter at the church until the secret operation was underway. Earlier, Marta Fremming, a nurse and wife of Dr. Kay Fremming, one of the town’s two physicians, had come to the parish hall—a block away from the church—to inform Grete Frederiksen, who lived in an apartment on the premises, that this new group—numbering as many as sixty people themselves—would arrive about dark, and so they did, in single carloads, beginning at six p.m.
Although no record survives directly linking Marta Fremming to Henry Skjær, it seems virtually certain that they must have worked jointly to bring the new group of refugees to the town and to the church. What is sure is that the unmarried Miss Frederiksen welcomed the new arrivals to the parish hall when they knocked on her kitchen door and spoke the password “hope.” She made the first two dozen people as comfortable as they could be in the parish hall itself, where they spent the evening in its dark and unheated central room; the others she escorted to the church loft, where they brought the total number of people now hidden there to perhaps ten dozen.
Virtually everyone in town, of course, knew that the church was filled with Jewish refugees. Throughout the afternoon and evening, people brought blankets and coats, tureens of soup, even a roast. But as soon as night descended, it became impossible for those who were hidden to eat because it was simply too dangerous to turn on even a single light. Buckets were placed in a corner to serve as makeshift toilet facilities, but neither could they be located once night fell and the interior of the loft grew dark as a cave. The temperature hovered barely above freezing; people’s hands and feet went numb; and the place was eerily silent—more than a hundred people packed into the small attic space, saying nothing for hours on end, not even daring to whisper, the only sound the incessant ticking of the clock in the tower, its maddening repetitions seeming to mock the refugees’ precarious fate.
It is not clear when it happened, but at some point prior to midnight, Dr. Fremming was called to the church to attend to someone who was ill. He may have arrived with Red Cross workers, and perhaps he was called instead to the parish hall. Neither is it known how long he stayed or whether he still remained when a series of knocks were made on the heavy door. “Get out! The Germans are coming,” those who were knocking whispered loudly, but whoever these people were, they did not utter the password, and Arne Kleven therefore did not open the door, and neither could he take credence in their warning.
At about midnight, however, the Gestapo did descend. They beat on the parish-hall door with pistols drawn; they spoke the password, and when Grete Frderiksen cracked the door to see who it was, a Gestapo officer shoved his boot in the opening to prevent her from slamming it shut, then a host of troopers burst into the place, readily capturing all the Jews who were hidden inside, only a few officers needed to detain the refugees there while the rest left for the church. Positioned beside the barred church door, Kleven could hear for a second time loud knocks and a shouted warning that the Germans were on their way—the admonition coming this time from Grete Frederiksen’s brother and fiancé, whom she had been able to alert by escaping out the parish hall’s kitchen door. But for the second time too, these men, speaking Danish, had not known the password, and so Kleven determined that he should do nothing more than search for alternative hiding places in the church, or for another exit, neither of which he could find.
Yet there was a tiny door concealed behind the altar, and Pastor Jensen was attempting to open it from the outside in order to alert Kleven and those in the loft of the immediate danger when a Gestapo agent positioned nearby spotted him. In hopes of gaining a bit of time, Jensen told the Gestapo that church sexton Aage Jørgensen possessed the only key to the building, and, accepting his story, he and Gestapo Chief Juhl made their way to Jørgensen’s house, where Jørgensen too helped stall for precious minutes by insisting that the key was a tricky one, and that perhaps he should come open the door himself, but the officers would have to wait while he dressed, he told them, and his dressing would be slow because his back was very bad.
Previously, the Gestapo had carried out its raids without the assistance of the thousands of German soldiers stationed in north Sjælland, but the barricaded church appeared to be a big enough prize that the Gestapo chief now ordered troops from a nearby garrison to provide assistance, and by about four a.m., the exterior of the church was flooded by light from automobiles and troop-trucks, and was surrounded as well by battle-ready soldiers. The long night of despair suffered by the people in the loft now appeared to be ending in utter horror, but from downstairs Kleven did his best to assure the refugees that their fortress would hold. Because Kleven’s key was pressed into the lock from the inside, the sexton—with the small and impatient Gestapo chief at his side—was unable to open the door, and still more terrifying moments passed before Juhl announced at the door that he now had no choice but to fire-bomb the building: the refugees either would be forced out by the ensuing smoke, or they would burn to death, or they could spare themselves and open the door. It was their decision, he shouted.
At five a.m., Arne Kleven took a deep breath, steeled himself for whatever was about to follow, then opened the heavy door. People in the loft above him had begun to plead for him to do so, and he too knew that hope now was lost. “Where are they?” Juhl cried as he burst into the small church. “You can damn well find them yourselves,” Kleven replied, and it was only seconds later when men armed with machine guns bounded into the loft, aimed blinding lights on the huddled, frozen figures they encountered there, then forced them out of the loft, into the night, and down the sloping street to the parish hall where, together with the refugees who had been captured earlier, they waited eight more hours before they were loaded into canvas-topped troop-trucks bound for the Horserød prison camp near Helsingør. A hundred and twenty Jews had failed in their desperate effort to reach exile in Sweden, and virtually all the townspeople of Gilleleje now ached with the belief that they horribly had let them down.
We will likely never know precisely when, or where, someone fleeing for his life or for hers gave Kay Fremming a coiled knot of Ludwig van Beethoven’s hair, held safe in a wood-frame locket. The identity—and the unexplained motive—of that person long may remain a mystery as well.
Although rumors swirled around the small harbor town for months, even years afterward that Dr. Fremming had been given something precious by one of the hunted refugees, he was a quiet and always insular man who appears never to have spoken openly about a most unusual gift he received on or about October 6, 1943. Nor did he ever affirm, on the other hand, that he had agreed to hold and guard the locket until its owner returned for it sometime hence. Yet whether the lock of hair was a profound offering of gratitude or simply someone else’s keepsake, which he agreed to hold in trust until the day when it could be reclaimed, it is sure beyond any doubt that this fragile bit of the corporeal Beethoven fell into Kay Fremming’s possession sometime during those few days of determined heroism on Denmark’s sea-buffeted shore.
Despite the absence of certainty, there are clues, at least, with which it is possible to piece together a scenario—or several of them—that bring the giving of the lock of hair into plausible focus. Marta Fremming did confirm long ago that the lock of hair was given to her husband in the midst of those most momentous days in Gilleleje’s history. It is certain as well that she and her husband were active in the collective effort to protect the Jews who rushed to their town in hopes that they could find a way to freedom in Sweden. And the fact seems inescapable, more specifically, that Kay and Marta Fremming were in contact, if not careful collaboration, with opera baritone Henry Skjær, who had urged refugees to travel from Copenhagen to Gilleleje on the afternoon of October 6, instructing them to go to the church to await passage to Höganäs on the Jan.
What is not known positively is whether Dr. Fremming and his wife also hid refugees in their home or at their clinic sometime during the days of the rescue, although that probability seems quite high as well—the lock of hair conceivably given to the doctor by someone he had begun to get to know and whose debt to him seemed great. Other questions, too, remain:
Why was Copenhagen resident Henry Skjær, already a luminary in the small and rarefied community of Danish music, so intimately involved in the rescue cause in Gilleleje, a provincial town that in those days was about three hours away from the city by train? Unlike Arne Kleven, whose union and journalism background made him a ready sort of activist, Skjær’s profession and his notoriety, on their face, do not make it appear obvious that he would have been eager to be involved. Did he, like Kleven, travel to Gilleleje and attempt to help people he did not know simply out of a heightened personal sense of moral and patriotic duty? Or was Skjær endeavoring to assist one or a few persons in particular—colleagues, friends, family members? Although people clearly remember that Skjær was present at a hastily called meeting in the early afternoon of October 6, soon after the Flyvbjerg’s abrupt departure from the harbor, his whereabouts during the remainder of the day and the ensuing awful night are unknown. What is certain is that Henry Skjær informed people in Copenhagen—either in person or, more likely, by telephone—that the Jan would sail from Smidstrup Beach, and that its passengers would wait at the Gilleleje Church to be taken to the ship. But did he, in fact, give that information to the person who then chose to flee to Gilleleje carrying with him or her the lock of hair?
Indeed, might that person have been 35-year old Edgar Hiller, also a professional singer, who had been employed by the Cologne opera when the record of his whereabouts was interrupted back in 1935? Were Henry Skjær and Edgar Hiller—resident in Denmark under a false name for some years perhaps—musical colleagues, even close friends? With Skjær’s help, was Edgar Hiller hidden at the Fremming’s house? Or did the doctor attend to him, or a family member, when he was called to the church? Did the donor somehow become aware that the doctor himself was much enamored of music and that he was an accomplished flutist as well?
These questions beg still others like them, yet they can be distilled into three elemental and enduring queries: Why did the locket’s owner choose to give it up in Gilleleje? Why did Kay Fremming forever remain so silent about the circumstances of the giving? And was it Edgar Hiller, in fact, who gave away the lock of hair his grandfather had cut from a great man’s corpse?
Russell Martin is a nonfiction author, filmmaker, novelist, and screenwriter, and the principal of Say Yes Quickly Productions.
Copyright © 2024 Russell Martin. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this novel excerpt may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the author.