Victor Cornelins

The idea had first been to find a very presentable family; an adult black couple engaged in making baskets and other handcrafts and ideally they should have small and pretty children.

Victor did not want to stay in the open West- Indian pavilion and walks over to play with igloos and stuffed bears in the Greenland area.

Although she is poor she is according to Cornelins himself, in his autobiography,[11] keeping the children well, going to church, sending the kids to Sunday school and is enjoying respect in the neighbourhood.

This may again have led "to the attention from the Danes" when the kids had to be picked, Cornelins ponders in his autobiography[12] and with grief his mother agrees to have one child sent away when she gets the offer.

19 years later, in 1924, Victor Cornelins now living in Nakskov, Denmark, marries Swedish Elvira Landén, and they have three children, Margit, Inger and Bengt.

[14] As Frank Larsen (not without sarcasm) notes: it is unclear how her good heart played a role when having two kids taken away from their families, sent across the ocean, to be put in a cave for others to look at, and harassed when walking through the city to and from the exhibition.

After graduating from the Jonstrup Teacher College, Cornelins begins his 55-year teaching career at the island of Lolland, where he used to spend many of his summer holidays after arriving in Denmark.

While life in the Copenhagen area was initially tough at his first caretaker mother, he has precious memories of his Lolland summer holidays at Lønstrupgård.

During cancer treatment at Nakskov hospital after retiring, Cornelins picks up his harmonica and involves doctors and nurses in singing and dancing.