04/05/2026
Tonight, candles will burn in windows all across Denmark.
It is the 4th of May. In 1945, at 8:36 in the evening, the BBC announced that the German occupation was over. People tore down their blackout curtains and lit candles in the windows. After five years of forced darkness, the light came back.
We light them for the boys. For the young men and women of the resistance who were executed at Ryvangen and in the woods and the prison yards. Executed in haste when the Germans realised they had lost.
Kim Malthe-Bruun was twenty-one. Most of them never saw the country they died for. He wrote a last letter to his mother just moments before:
“I see the infinite chain of generations that bore me, and which I, through you, carry onward… And this is my happiness.”
My grandfather was a child during the occupation. He cycled through the streets with secret messages hidden inside his handlebars, carrying words between the young men of the resistance. My great-grandfather’s school in Southern Jutland was seized and occupied by German soldiers.
We light candles because freedom is never given. Demagogues and ideologies do not announce themselves with jackboots anymore. They arrive quietly, in language we recognise, in the name of ”tolerance”, offering safety in exchange for thought, certainty in exchange for nuance, belonging in exchange for the right to disagree.
A free, secular society is not an inheritance. It is a discipline. It has to be defended in every generation, with words, with votes, with ordinary courage.
So tonight, one small flame in the window. A promise to the boys at Ryvangen. A promise to ourselves.
Never again the 9th of April and forever the 4th of May.
