Susanne is adopted and did everything not to be found. But one day there was a letter from Greenland

Susanne Sahlgren has been adopted from Greenland, but people's prejudices made Susanne distance herself from her origins. Until she received a letter from her biological sister.

- Where are you from?

Or worse:

- Do you drink?

55-year-old Susanne Sahlgren has no figures on how many times she has been asked those questions.

Susanne grew up in Dragør, where she still lives today and lives a quiet life with her husband, dogs and work.

Yet she has always felt she stood out, no matter how little she wanted attention.

WATCH 'GREENLAND'S MISSED CHILDREN' ON DRTV

Susanne is one of the 164 children who were officially adopted from Greenland to Denmark between 1964-79. You can read her story in the article here and follow her journey back to the roots in DR1's documentary series 'Greenland's missing children' on DRTV.

Susanne was born in Greenland to a Greenlandic mother, and immediately after the birth she was adopted to Denmark, where after a few months in an orphanage she ended up with a loving Danish family in a detached house neighborhood in Dragør.

The parents adopted a Greenlandic boy a few years later, and to teach the children about their origins, they bought children's books about Greenland and wanted to talk to them about their adoption. But that met with great resistance from Susanne.

- They were hugely interested in telling me when they got me, how and how, and they did it in the best sense, but I just shut down, she says.

For a large part of her life, Susanne rejected everything that was about Greenland. - I had not asked to be adopted and put in the situation that I had to deal with it all the time. I just wanted to be me, Susanne - my mother and father's child, she says. (© DR)

The more the parents tried, the more it tickled Susanne's sense of being different.

So instead of seeking more knowledge about her background, she ended up reacting the exact opposite - she avoided everything that was about adoption and Greenland.

- If there was anything on the radio or television about Greenland, I went out of the room. It was right down to the detail that I did not like the color green and did not want to know how old I was when I was adopted , she says.

'Should not be this stereotypical Greenlander'

But no matter how hard Susanne tried to distance herself, she could not run from her Greenlandic exterior, and as she got older and started going to Copenhagen, she got more and more involuntary attention. There were many visible Greenlanders in several parts of the capital, and according to Susanne, the number of prejudices she was faced with escalated.

- I have been asked at job interviews or at the doctor: "Do you drink?". I have experienced not being taken seriously by other authorities because I was a Greenlander. It's massive what I've been exposed to by prejudice and racism.

How did it affect you?

- At least I should not be this stereotypical Greenlander. When I was younger and safe in Dragør, I could party a bit. But as I got older and met new people and met these prejudices, I completely stopped drinking alcohol.

- I have had very few boyfriends because it should not be said that I was "promiscuous". I liked buying clothes from a slightly more expensive clothing brand, but no matter how nice and clean I was, I got a remark like "well, are you going to Sundholm?" (an institution on Amager for the vulnerable).

How did it feel?

- It made me sad and angry. Here I went and behaved so properly, and then I was still exposed to people's prejudices. It also made me distance myself even more from being a Greenlander.

Got secret number and address

Susanne's great fear was that it suddenly knocked on the door, and then Susanne's Greenlandic family stood there and wanted to be reunited.

So she chose to get the secret number and address, and she even contacted the DR program 'Traceless'; well, not to look for her biological family, like most adoptees who turn to 'Traceless', but to announce that she would not be found if anyone looked for her.

But then one day it happened anyway. Susanne's father had been sent a letter from a lawyer on behalf of Susanne's biological half-sister in Greenland, who was looking for her.

Shocked, she threw the letter into a drawer without opening it.

- I was furious and wanted to write a long angry letter to the lawyer about what the hell it was for a situation to put myself in. I had not asked to be adopted , I had not asked for any of this. I tend to be in a reasonably good mood, but I was so angry for several weeks that even my husband kept his distance.

After a while, Susanne took courage and read the letter with a friend, and it was quite true that her half-sister tried to reach out and get in touch with Susanne, whose adoption had affected her mother's life a lot.

But even though the letter made a big impression, Susanne put it away, and it actually took seven years before she found it again and felt like she was somewhere in life where she had the surplus to go into her past.

Susanne wearing a Greenlandic national costume. (© DR)

So she found her half-sister on Facebook and sent her a Messenger message.

- That night I did not sleep at all. I just sat and glared at Messenger and looked in the spam filter - it was so nerve-wracking, she remembers.

The next day the sister answered, and then they wrote back and forth. For a few months, Susanne waited for some explosion to come now that she had begun the new chapter.

- I thought everything bad happened, I simply do not know what I had imagined. I also felt like I was betraying my family back home, even though they had always said the opposite. But nothing happened, other than that we had contact, and then I could finally start to relax.

Suddenly it was as if a door to the Greenlandic side of herself was opened. Everything she had rejected before, she threw herself over with huge interest - Greenlandic culture, art, landscape, history.

And most important of all: Last summer, Susanne took courage and traveled with her husband to Disko Island's only town, Qeqertarsuaq ('Godhavn' in Danish), to see her biological mother and her half-siblings.

The night before the meeting, she had not closed an eye.

Thoughts ran around, and as Susanne walked across a long bridge where her biological mother and half-sister were standing at the end, she devised all sorts of strategies for how she could run away if it became too much. But everything changed the second they fell on each other's necks.

Here, Susanne meets her biological family for the first time ever.

- Everything just calmed down. It was instant love . I could feel their love for me. I do not know how to describe it, but my state of panic disappeared the second we hugged. It's a feeling that still sits in me. Now I am completely moved, she says.

At the meeting, Susanne could immediately see a lot of similarities with them. She loves to be creative and to draw and paint, and so does the whole Greenlandic family - and her biological grandfather's brother is Jakob Danielsen, who was a renowned Greenlandic painter from Disko Bay, who died in 1938.

- From the second I landed and saw Greenland, I just enjoyed being there, and I fell wildly in love with nature, says Susanne. She hopes she can take a trip back to Greenland next year. (© DR)

On the trip to Greenland, she was also asked her biological mother why she was adopted to Denmark.

The mother told that she was 17 years old and the father 23 when she got pregnant.

They wanted to get married, and then the mother's parents had to take care of Susanne, while the mother had to go to Nuuk to complete her education.

But the mother's sister had a Danish man who said no. He thought that Susanne should be adopted away to Denmark, and at that time the Dane's words were law, as her mother explained to Susanne. The Dane and his sister have died today, so no one can get an answer as to why Susanne had to be adopted , just as Susanne's biological father drowned many years ago.

When Susanne's Greenlandic mother was in Denmark in February, she fulfilled her great wish to see Amalienborg and was also at the Opera to see Susanne's husband's ballet dancer daughter perform. The mother comes from the village Kangerluk (on Diskoøen), where there are 18 inhabitants and 15 houses. (Photo: PRIVATE PHOTO)

But in return, she found what she had always denied she was looking for: Her roots.

- I wanted to be with them all the time up there. It was great, as she says.

The mother has been to Copenhagen

And in fact, they have become even closer since Susanne was up there this summer. Her biological mother was in Denmark in connection with a hospital visit in February, and it ended up that she came and lived with Susanne and her husband during that period.

Here they had fun, sat on the sofa and talked for hours and were tourists in Copenhagen.

Susanne's Danish mother died many years ago of illness, but her biological mother met Susanne's father, whom she thanked many times for taking care of her.

Susanne herself can also feel that a huge change has taken place with her since she threw the unopened letter from her Greenlandic family in the drawer and left it for many years without answering.

- Meeting my "biofamily" has made me less tough. I have had the parades so much up my whole life with my adoption and Greenland that it just as quietly spread to everything else, says Susanne.

- It has changed me. I'm still Danish - but I'm also from Greenland. I can feel the Greenlandic in me now, and that's something I'm proud of.

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