Helene Thiesen says she froze when it came time to wave goodbye to her mother as she boarded the MS Disko that sailed from Nuuk, Greenland, to Denmark in 1951.
“I cried and cried — I couldn’t understand why my mother would let me go,” said Thiesen, 77, who now lives in Stensved, a town in southern Denmark.
She was only seven when Danish authorities took her and 21 other Greenlandic Inuit children to Fedgaarden, a Danish holiday camp that was used for months as a sort of residential school.
There, the children learned Danish and were forced to stop speaking Greenlandic.
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