In a village church

At dawn the next morning, we set off. On each bus, two men were to lie on the roof as aerial lookouts, one facing forward and one backward. They were warmly dressed and carried a tube which they were to tap on the roof with in case of danger. We passed the border control, and with excitement, we looked forward to what the day would bring—perhaps the last of such trips. But one could perhaps say it turned out to be an anticlimax, albeit a fortunate one. We hadn’t gone far into Germany when we met the convoy we were to assist. None of the Swedes had been killed or injured in the attack, though some of the passengers had.

In the rural church in Bov, a parish in southern Jutland on the border with Germany, we Swedes gathered along with some Danish Red Cross personnel with whom we worked. We formed close ranks on both sides of the aisle leading to the church door, and also inside the church. Erik Ringman’s coffin, draped with a Swedish flag and carried by his closest convoy comrades, moved slowly down the aisle. In front of the coffin, a Swedish flag and a Red Cross flag were carried side by side, and at the very front Danish girls walked, scattering flowers from individual baskets. Gradually, the ranks of comrades closed in behind the coffin.

With the coffin placed at the altar, the service was conducted by a Norwegian pastor, who himself had been imprisoned in a German concentration camp and had later worked there. It was deeply moving, and one thought that it could have been any one of us lying there, and that the number of coffins could have been much greater. Thoughts also turned to Lieutenant Hallquist, who lay seriously injured in a German hospital.

One also thought of the dead we had seen during the transports and of the poor souls we transported from Neuengamme, who were thrown into a pile at another concentration camp.