I had my Mom over for a visit this weekend. She had to attend the 50th wedding anniversary of some good old friends of her. After a six (!) hour train ride from Jylland she was a little late, and being 78 she is also holds back on expenses she did not want to hurry there in a cap, so I naturally followed her down there by foot following the path along the Copenhagen lakes.
Somehow we immediately stroke up a conversation about the movie “Flammen og Citronen”, which she recently saw. She didn’t like the movie. Allthough of the violence and desperation which she found realistic, she found that it was way too smooth and too constructed.
That led me to ask to her own experiences with WWll. I had been meaning to ask her for a long time about her Dad, which I remember having been told was a very active member of the Resistance at Fyn (Fuen), participating mainly in receiving and hiding weapon from the British, and in sabotages.
Typical to a degree for that generation, it is not something that has been talked about. But after having read Peter Øvig Knudsens “Efter drabet” (After the Kill), my curiosity was naturally upped.

She told stuff, but it was clear that she also DID NOT tell me other stuff.
But she did tell me that her dad –for the last 6 month of the war, very rarely was at home. My granddad was a forester, working for some of the larger private forests at Fuen (counts, baron, blue-blood country), and among other things his job was to keep poachers of the ground, why he naturally had access to weapons. But that was also the excuse he learned my mom and grand mom: If the Germans should turn up while he was gone, they should tell them that he was hunting poachers, and always had made sure that his bed looked like he had just slept in it.

In April 1945 – a month before the liberation my Mom was 14, and was about to have her confirmation, which of course her Dad would like to participate in. But it would also mean an obvious reason for the German scumbags to pay a visit at their home and arrest him. A friend of them – a Count (?), the local head of resistance, had just been shot in Odense, so everyone was afraid.
But typical for my Grand mom she wanted to go ahead with the confirmation, why she decided to have the party in the Chicken shed! She spent days that spring cleaning out chicken shit, painting, putting up fabrics, and generally just making it look like a fitting place for party, with that one specific detail. Behind the chair where Granddad were planned to sit she left a whole in the wall, covered it with a blanket, so that he could escape directly into the forest if the Germans should turn up.
That however, they didn’t Mum told.
But on the other hand that - the party in the chicken shed - was how she got her nickname, that stuck with her for life. Everyone from that day on called her: Putte.

Putte, slang for chicken, or the sound a chicken makes, a so-called onomatopoeia: the creation of words which include sounds that are similar to the noises that the word refer to, like "pop", "boom", "squelch". "squirt”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia