Iceland review - 2015, Qupperneq 61

ICELAND REVIEW 59
tion, Hildur simply says, “When you’re
young, everything’s exciting. Everyone was
friendly to me.” Seated in her wheelchair,
sipping coffee in the communal kitchen of
the retirement home Hvammur in Húsavík,
where Hildur now lives, her positive atti-
tude obviously hasn’t faded. “I’m happy
here. life couldn’t be better.”
Both Hildur and Gisela arrived in
Reykjavík along with 183 other Germans
on the passenger ship Esja on June 8, 1949.
“I don’t remember much about that day
apart from that the sun was shining,” recalls
Gisela. “and it was windy. all the time it
was windy.” Walking through the capital,
Gisela was surprised at how small the
buildings were. “I thought austurvöllur was
rather strange,” she says of the city’s cen-
tral square by which the Reykjavík cathe-
dral—tiny in comparison with German
cathedrals—and alþingi parliament stand.
“pósthússtræti was the only street where
there were tall buildings, Hótel Borg and
Reykjavíkurapótek.”
Gisela was placed at Vífilsstaðir, a tuber-
culosis hospital ten kilometers (6.4 miles)
outside Reykjavík. To begin with, she
worked at the on-site farm but didn’t feel
she was of much use. “The housekeeper
gave me a leg of lamb to cook. I had no
idea what to do with it. When it came to
gutting a huge haddock, I was also at a loss.”
Gisela felt more comfortable at the hospi-
tal. “I enjoyed helping the patients.” Five
other German women lived and worked
at Vífilsstaðir. “So we had a little com-
munity there. We all came to Iceland in
1949 but none of us arrived at the same
time. The others came with trawlers.” The
friends used their spare time to explore
the city’s cultural life. “There wasn’t much
happening at the time but we went to art
exhibitions.” Their Icelandic friends were
eager to teach them the language. “anna
Guðmundsdóttir, the actress, took us to the
National Theater. We saw Íslandsklukkan
and Fjalla-Eyvindur [classic plays] and I
didn’t understand a thing,” laughs Gisela.
“‘It’s good for you,’ anna insisted, and so
we went again. The second time, I under-
stood a little more and the third time, I
was starting to get the hang of it. It helped
listening to the language being spoken.” In
the middle of summer, the friends bought
bus tickets to travel the country. “In the
highlands, there weren’t any roads, just
rocks, mountains and wastelands. It was
so alien. I don’t remember our destina-
tions, only Ásbyrgi. It was the strangest
place I’d ever been to. an enclave of cliffs,”
Gisela says of the famous horseshoe-shaped
nature reserve in Northeast Iceland, only
40 km south of Grjótnes.
SUcceSSfUl integration
Meanwhile, Hildur kept herself busy. “I
helped out with the housework, haymak-
ing and milking.” The houses at Grjótnes,
where two families lived, were unusually tall
and stately for the Icelandic countryside.
In the farm’s heyday, it had 40 residents
and people came there from neighboring
farms and villages to dance. “That was
before my time. Many people had moved
to Reykjavík,” says Hildur. The language
wasn’t a problem. “I was quick to learn
Icelandic. My brother had given me a book
before I left [Schatten über der Marshalde,
originally I marsfjällets skugga (1937) by
Swedish author Bernhard Nordh] and
when I came to Grjótnes I noticed that the
same story was being published as a serial
in newspaper Tíminn. So I compared the
two.” She never got homesick, she states.
hiStorY
gisela Schulze.