My “birthday”

My Facebook friends sometimes get confused. In my profile there, I have 4th May listed as my birthday. Those who know me in real life know that in fact, I was born on a different date. I have today’s date listed as my birthday in my profile partly because I see no reason to give Facebook more information than needed. But the date 4th May does have a deep meaning for me, indeed deeper than the date of my physical birth.

On this day, 40 years ago, a family of three–husband, wife and 11-year old son–arrived in Copenhagen after an all-night train and ferry journey from Poland. We arrived at Copenhagen’s main station around the time I write this, fairly early in the morning. We were political refugees, finally escaping from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. At the station, we were met by a man from the Foreigner’s Police (Fremmedpolitiet) as it was called back then. We were taken to some kind of office in the centre of town, briefly interviewed, given some money and installed in a hotel in a residential area of Copenhagen. This was our home for the first two weeks in Denmark.

My parents took a nap and I went for a walk in the surrounding streets. Everything looked so beautiful and clean, and the shops–small neighbourhood shops, but still–were full of things that were luxuries in Communist Poland, such as oranges or bananas. The sun was shining; and suddenly–I found a 1 krone piece on the sidewalk. It was enough to buy a wonderful Coke and some candy. My new life was getting off to a great start.

Two weeks later, we were told that the agency helping resettle refugees in Denmark had allocated an apartment in Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, to us, and so we left our hotel in Copenhagen and moved on to Aarhus. We spent that summer taking Danish classes, and in August I started 6th grade at Skt. Knuds Skole in Aarhus. By December, seven months after our arrival, both my parents had jobs, and we left the apartment in Grøfthøjparken and moved to the place that was going to be my home during the next several years, in another part of Aarhus called Frydenlund.

Everything I have achieved in life, I owe to my parents’ decision to take me out of Poland, and to the welcome we got from the Danish people and authorities 40 years ago. That is why today IS my real birthday, as far as I am concerned. On this day, I became a free human being.

By happy coincidence, the 4th of May is also the anniversary of the liberation of Denmark in 1945. How appropriately symbolic and fitting!