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Danish Faarikall. The thatched and whitewashed Danish farms sent their bacon and butter to Germany. The folk schools brayed the teachings of Nietzsche. The quiet of Copenhagen's Wivex coffee house at the entrance to the Tivoli Gardens was broken by the shouts of Nazi officers. Danish chefs no longer cooked their Faarikall, of lamb, cabbage and sour cream.
Lacking food, the Danes still had a king. On his 72nd birthday, Sept. 26, Christian, the elder brother of Norway's Haakon, sent a curt answer to Hitler's flowery message of good will. The answer: "Thank you, Christian, Rex." This week Christian lay injured by a fall from his horse* and the Nazis had applied new pressures to make Denmark a "model province" of the Third Reich.
Hollandsche Biefstuk. The proprietor of the Restaurant Royal in The Hague, where Hollandsche Biefstuk was a specialty, used to say: "My patrons eat me poor and drink me rich." They drank him rich no more. Holland's food ration was cut as winter approached. The Nazis announced that all men capable of bearing arms would be conscripted for service in Germany ("Dutchmen must not only work with their hands, they must also use weapons to guard Europe"). To enforce their decree the Nazis said that Dutch parents "who do not collaborate in the new order will have their children taken away from them to be molded in the Nazi pattern." These were the children who, in 1940, when Nazi cars entering Holland drove off ferries, politely opened the doors and announced: "Gentlemen, welcome to England."
Belgian Rutabagas. Often has Belgium been in the path of conquest (Caesar, Wellington, Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolf Hitler). Last week the Belgians were starving again. Gaunt young mothers carried babies doomed to die. Where there was one pre-war tuberculous patient, there were now four. The wide-moated farms of the polders produced food for Germany. For the Belgians there were rutabagas. Said the Swedish Committee for Relief of Belgian Children: "The mortality among children in Belgium is now . . . as bad, if not worse, than in Greece." Yet . . .
A bomb exploded in a Brussels theater when the Germans showed a film of the Russian campaign to a picked audience of Rexists and Flemish nationalists. A warehouse filled with machines and cereals mysteriously burned. For acts of sabotage in Brussels, Liége and Mons 100 men were to be deported. "Do not forget," said a Belgian who escaped to London, "that people who are obsessed with the threat of famine and disease are scarcely in condition to fight against a perfectly organized army and police force."
Polish Miod. In front of the Castle of Kings in Cracow the Germans have demolished the statue of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who fought beside George Washington. In Warsaw the ghetto boundaries are squeezed tighter each month as more dead are carried out. Food supplies are now one-quarter of what they were before 1939. The Fukier wine cellar no longer has its miod (old fermented honey). The Germans have left only black crusts of bread for Poles and there is no longer bigos, brewed of wild game and cabbage.
Hitler once said: "Five minutes before the end of the war, whichever side may win, all the Jews in Poland will have been wiped out." By last week more than 700,000 had been starved or shot.