Erna Bonde-Henriksen, a long-time member of the Quechee Lakes community, died in her home in Quechee on November 17, 2020, a month after being diagnosed with cancer. She was 93. She lived a long and amazing life.

Erna Rasmussen was born in Skanderborg, Denmark on January 1, 1927. Her grandfather and father were the biggest horse sellers in Denmark, in a time when cars, trucks, and tractors were rare. She often regaled friends with the story of how her father demonstrated that a horse had a good demeanor: he had Erna sit under the horse and then he gave it a good swat on the rump. As a teenager during the Nazi occupation, she worked at the local train station. One evening a friend suggested that she leave work early. The station was then bombed by the underground Danish Resistance movement.

After the war, while visiting family in Hobro, Denmark, she met Erik, a former-member of the Resistance. In 1948 he would take a job with the Danish West India Company on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. In 1949, she would travel 5,000 miles, and what seemed like 50 years back in time, to a tropical island and culture unlike anything she had ever known. She and Erik married and made their life-long home on the island.

For more than two decades, Erna worked as the manager and buyer for Continental, a store that sold china, crystal, silverware, and other fine European goods. She developed relationships with some of the titans of American industry who would return year after year. She was so trusted that in some instances they asked her to select and package Christmas gifts for their employees, package everything up for pick up following their cruises, and fill in the correct amount on the check they left with her.

In 2017, when her St. Thomas home was destroyed by hurricanes Irma and Maria, Erna was able to find comfort and familiarity in a condo she and Erik had purchased in Quechee forty-three years earlier. There she enjoyed hosting dinners for her friends, playing golf, dining at local restaurants, and frequenting the Quechee Library. She split her remaining years living in her surviving guest cottage on St. Thomas and her condo in Quechee.

Erna was predeceased by her husband of 67 years, Erik, who died in 2016. She is survived by her son Nils, long-time best friends Annelise Pedersen and Joan Hostetler, and countless others in Denmark, the Virgin Islands, and Quechee who marveled at her strength, independence, and perseverance in difficult times. Never shy, she continued to make new friends, even into her nineties.