Copenhagen Jewish Cultural Festival 2024 : 3

Copenhagen Jewish Cultural Festival 2024:3

Meet the Ostrynskis

One of the afternoons (4 June 2024) during the Jewish Cultural Week in Copenhagen, I listened to a very good interview Michael Rachlin had with Nathalie Ostrynski, the author of a new book entitle De Mørke Bånd (The Dark Ties,) published in 2024 by small publishing house Grønningen 1. I finally bought her book, which I have started to read. I like it very much. It is a very special book, which I want to recommend for all those who work with refugees.

1980

I moved from Iceland in 1980 to Denmark to study archaeology. 1980 was also the year Nathalie Ostrynksi was born. In the Århus suburb of Brabrand, were I ended up living in some great students´accommodations, after some problems finding a permanent place to live (see here in Danish), I ran into many elderly Jewish refugees in and around the City West shopping precinct in Brabrand. I became good friends with a few of them, who could speak English or German and some even a little Danish. I drank coffee with them in the "mall" and was invited to their cultural afternoons in the Brabrand local library, more often than I could attend.

One thing I remember clearly, was some of the elderly men´s bitterness. Not only that towards Poland they had to leave due to antisemitism. More stressing to some of the elderly in the group, seemed to be the attitude of some Danish Jews they encountered after they had arrived in Denmark in the late 1960s. I never got the full explanation of what that attitude really was all about. But it definitely resulted in some of the Jews moving to Århus  away from Jewish life in Copenhagen.

I tried to find out by asking Nathalie Ostrinsky a very frank question, where I described what my impression of the Polish Jews was in the 1980s suburb of Århus. My question has since resulted in five non-Polish Jewish members of the Jewish community in Copenhagen approaching me, to tell me with a stiff pointy finger, "That it was not like I think it was.". They all told me that they have visited the refugee ship St. Lawrence in the Copenhagen, to help the newcomers from Poland - and some assured me that everyone aboard that ship had been happy - and that those who were not content were probably just some sour and miserable Communists, "who didn´t want anything to do with Jewish life anyway".

Well, imagine some of the Jews who headed for Århus reading professor Isi Foighel´s very negative assessments of them in a report he wrote for a Danish Refugee agency in Danmark. Why was a professor of Economics, a conservative politician and himself a child-refugee from Nazi Germany so negative towards newcomers in need. Prof. Foighel phoned me. when my book Medaljens Bagside (The other Side of the Coin) was about to be published, flushing out gallons of sour wine from his grapes of wrath, telling me that he would do everything in his power to stop my book, because "some things were better forgotten than mentioned" like he put it. His brave opponent in the once upon a time Copenhagen Kehilla-Conflict (best forgotten), Rabbi Bent Melchior,  had also learned about a detail in my book. He was much more civilized about me digging into the past than professor Foighel was, when he commented on an application he had made for an Aliyah to Israel, which I had discovered in an Israeli archive. Young Melchior wanted to move to Israel because of Anti-Semitism in post-WWII Denmark.

Bent Melchior´s appplication for an aliyah due to Antisemitism in Danmark. Fig. 134, page 334 in my book Medaljens Bagside (Forlaget Vandkunsten 2004).

Possibly some of the Jewish gentlemen in Brabrand, a few of them possibly disillusioned Communists, might also have heard how their "ideological brother" in Denmark, editor Carl Madsen, described the Jewish refugees from Poland in his book Flygtning 33 (Refugee 33, published in 1972) about the political Refugees of the 30s. Madsen wrote: In 1969 the stream of so-called "refugees", ca. 1900 of them, came to Denmark. Jews from Poland dominated. Nowadays, no one speaks about them any more. They have been utilized. Now forgotten. Back than they could be used, and allowed themselves to be used in an excessive campaign of defamation against Socialist Poland."  

Welcome to Denmark, Rødgrød med fløde og én over nakken. ... ... ... Denmark is what Denmark is, what Denmark is, what Denmark has always been: A very flat Country.