cc >> I'd like to welcome you
to the 2011 Wisconsin Book Festival.
How many years now has the Wisconsin Book Festival
been around? >> Ten.
>> Ten years? And, of course, this is put on
by the Wisconsin Humanities Council.
I am Paul Houseman. I am standing up here today
because I represent the Madison Community Foundation, and we are
one of the proud sponsors of this event.
They have other wonderful sponsors.
So I'd like to introduce our authors who are going to be
talking about, of course, "And Then Came the Liberators."
Authors/editors/translators, in this case.
We have with us here, let's see, from my right to left,
Richard Quinney, who is the editor and publisher of the book
and also several books that combine autobiography
and photography. And then next, Kathleen Stokker.
She said it rhymes with joker, so that's how I remember that.
She is a professor of Norwegian, director of Scandinavian Studies
at Luther College, and she wrote the afterward to the book.
And Solveig Schavland, did I get that sort of right?
She is the translator of this kind of undiscovered, at least
among English speaking audiences, undiscovered work.
So without further ado, they're here to talk about their book.
>> This is the book that was rescued practically from a
dumpster a couple years ago by Carol Bjerke and Lee Bjerke
visiting their son in Portland who has a book shop.
The original book in Norwegian, just a few copies were printed
on a letter press, and there were only a few copies in
existence. They brought it back from their
trip and showed it to us, and we said immediately this book needs
to be known and translated for an American audience.
So we have it here, "And Then Came the Liberators."
And I wanted to say this is about a particular time and
place, that's obvious, but two general ideas behind it.
One is the occupation of one country by another.
This case, Germany occupying Norway, 1940 to 1945.
But we can think of any occupation of our own country,
for example. The United States occupying
countries in central America, Iraq, Afghanistan.
This is a story of the legacy, also, of occupation that can go
on. A legacy that goes on for
generations when one country occupies another.
The other theme, my particular interest in this, is the role of
the artist as witness. Jaern, as we'll see, documented
over the five-year period, under very dangerous circumstances,
what he was experiencing and, as an artist, was making woodcuts
of the events.
I'd like to read the end of his foreword.
And we use this on the back of the dust jacket.
This book is about me and mine during the war years, but this
is the way it had to be. Only in this way and no other
way could I write about what had happened.
But I believe that most people here have experienced something
similar, and therefore I hope that this journal can serve as a
journal for many others. Most of all, I hope that the
younger generation will find something they will always
remember about tyranny and oppression.
We must never forget what happened.
It could happen that one or another crazy person would want
to start a war again. The last part of his foreword.
I'd like to read his entry for the woodcut that we have on the
screen of the artist himself looking out on to the street.
And this is the translation from his journal.
A couple of years ago the evening paper wrote that it was
not necessary for adults to get milk because all of the
nutrition in the milk the cows got from plants.
Why not then go further and say that we have no need for
vegetables because all of the nutrition in vegetables came
from the soil and the air. Eat dirt and drink air.
Live simply. There's so little now.
Believe in propaganda. Finally, I've been very weary
and tired lately. This morning I discovered that I
had a rupture. The doctors said that it was
common because of the diet.
Artist's witness during an occupation, during the war.
I want to show the first woodcut in his journal.
Number one. It's the day, the evening of the
occupation in Oslo. And this is Jaern and his wife.
His entry is this. It's late in the evening then,
April 8th. The occupation was April 9th,
1940. April 8th, 1940.
My wife and I were sitting in a cafe in the center of town at
11:30 in the evening. Suddenly all the lights went
out. We walked and stumbled on the
way home, and the only light we saw was in some of the windows
in the German consulate. The invasion had begun.
The book then has 102 woodcuts over the five years, and the
story develops and we want to show and tell as much of it as
we can. So we'll come back to some of
the woodcuts. Kathleen Stokker at Luther
College, Scandinavian studies, has written about the context of
this period and the role of the artist.
And we're fortunate that she has written an afterward which could
be a foreword to understand an afterward in the book.
And she's going to tell us some things now about the occupation
and the artist. Kathleen.
>> Thank you, Richard. It's I that feel honored to be a
part of this project. This is really, as you've
already heard, a very moving document in many ways.
Humor, his mordant humor, and of course the tragedy of the
situation.
Well, as you've heard, the document within the covers of
that book could well have cost its creator his life.
In its bare bone simplicity, and that was exactly the one I was
going to choose to show that, the bare bone simplicity, Albert
Jaern's account captures in words and woodcuts the
atrocities and indignities witnessed by Norwegians during
their country's five-year long occupation by Hitler's forces.
Albert Jaern was born in 1893 and lived only to be 56 years
old. Lived in Norway, in Oslo, the
capital city of Norway. He worked as a book illustrator
for Aschehough, still Norway's largest publishing house, where
he also produced the cover art for some 500 books, and about as
many book plates were designed by him for special collectors
and they largely have a format just like what we're seeing in
the book.
Jaern, as this shows us so well, favored block cuts of wood or
linoleum with simplified lines and services, free of
affectation or exaggeration. Even before and what was so
unique about him, what he stood out for, was that through such
simple means he could capture so much of the feeling of that
time, as in this example. We can see them feeling their
way home in this unusual atmosphere that has now
descended and would last for the next 500, seemed like 500, five
years because you couldn't have light escaping from windows.
Those windows would not have been allowed.
They would have brought a nasty rap on the door by Nazi guards
saying blind those windows, the British are out there looking to
attack us. No headlights on cars.
No streetlights. This is pretty much how it
seemed in Oslo from accounts during those next five years.
But even before the German occupation, the German invasion
of Norway, which happened on April 9th, 1940, Jaern had a
sense of lurking danger. During a three-week auto trip
through Germany in 1937, he witnessed, as he writes, a
leader who loved cannons and a people who would rather have
cannons than butter. When war did come to Norway,
Jaern was only 46 years old. Significantly, it was this work
that managed to keep his art alive and through which he
managed to keep it alive for us. He expressed, he said, better
through woodcuts than in words. So the words are rather small,
the entries, but very pithy, and then when combined with the
cuts, they're fabulous. And what he did then was to
observe everyday acts of war, and number 30, please.
So this is just an example of that.
Some workman with his briefcase having been beaten down by the
Nazi police. Keeping this record kept Jaern
in great personal danger, as we heard.
So he must have felt strongly compelled to express his
feelings. To avoid detection, as we've
heard, he scrupulously hid his day book in a secret compartment
behind a removable wall panel. And there it went undiscovered,
amazingly, despite repeated Nazi raids and ransacking of his
home. The original audience for
Jaern's day book had personally experienced or were otherwise
well acquainted with the events Jaern depicted.
Since then, however, the generation who knew them has
fallen away, and many of the details of those years were
forgotten, but, as Richard said, it was precisely so that people
would not forget that he wrote this day book and because he
wanted Norwegians to remember two things especially:
their own confusion and fear as well as the enemies'
tyranny and oppression. And it was, therefore, that
Richard and Solveig were kind enough to ask me to write an
afterward that could put some of these things into context and to
help us appreciate Jaern's art and artistry in preserving that
context. And so some background.
Before down on April 9th, 1940, Hitler's soldiers invaded
several coastal Norwegian towns and cities whose citizens awoke
to find German soldiers marching in their streets.
Hitler planned a similar attack on Oslo, but the sinking of the
battleship Blucher in the Oslo Fjord, some 20 miles south of
Oslo, severely delayed the plan. The sinking killed some 600 Nazi
soldiers who had been prepared to invade Oslo, and it enabled
Norway's King Haakon VII to elude capture.
Later dubbed The King Who Said No, Haakon VII famously refused
German orders to collaborate with the Nazis.
He promptly left the city and while traveling east to the town
of Elverum became the target of Nazi bombs.
Air attacks continued relentlessly to trace his path
as he continued his journey north by northwest, eventually
reaching the Arctic town of Tromso, way above the Arctic
Circle. Unprepared for armed combat,
Norwegian military forces had to surrender on June 10th.
For one thing, they'd gotten word that France was falling and
they all upped and left. And there were the Norwegians
who hadn't been trained. They hadn't prepared for such an
eventuality, planning to live in peace.
At about this time, King Haakon and his government ministers
began their escape to England. Through mine infested waters,
they crossed the North Sea and subsequently established in
London, Norway's legitimate government in exile and in
protest to the Nazi regime that had taken control back home.
Two months earlier on the evening of April 9th, the night
of the invasion of his homeland, Vidkun Quisling, whose name you
may know, has become synonymous for traitor in many languages
including English, he made his way to the national broadcasting
station in Oslo and announced to his fellow Norwegians that they
must give up all resistance to the German soldiers who, he
said, had come as friends to help Norway, to protect this
tiny nation from British attack. Quisling had founded Norway's
Nazis party. Nasjonal Samling, as it was
called, or NS as you'll see it abbreviated in the book.
In 1933, the very same year that Hitler came to power in Germany.
Quisling lacked the hypnotic charisma of Hitler however, nor
did his country face the extreme challenges of post-World War I
Germany, who was then in dire need of repairing its damaged
reputation and ruined economy after having been found guilty
of war crimes by the Treaty of Versailles.
So Hitler was kind of the right person in the right place for
Germany. Most Norwegians, though,
remained unmoved by Nazi ideology, especially its promise
of world domination, and they did not join the Nazi party in
sufficient numbers to support even a single seat in the
Norwegian storting, their parliament.
Norway had not gained independence in modern times
until 1905, a mere 35 years before the German invasion.
And as mentioned, because the nation had intended to live in
peace, there was little political will to invest in
armaments. When the king and some
government ministers called for more spending on munitions
during the second half of the 1930s, being well aware of what
was brewing farther south, their urgings fell on deaf ears.
Instead, they were prioritizing social concerns to narrow the
enormous disparity which then existed in the '30s in living
standard between Norway's wealthy and their working
classes.
But these early social reforms, which, of course, eventually
paved the way for Norway's famed welfare state, they seemed to
Quisling and other descendents of moneyed families in Norway to
be communism. And they rejected these measures
for precisely that reason. And here, number 18.
And so Jaern writes in one of his entries, for which we'll see
the image, he writes that we can't meet anymore, me and my
friends, me and my pals that used to always meet at the local
cafe and talk about the events of the day.
Such a thing was no longer allowed.
Meetings of more than three people on a street corner wasn't
allowed, and this particularly wasn't allowed because, as he
says, the pharmacist who has moved into town, and this was
the problem, you never knew whose side people were on, and
the pharmacist who had moved into town had decided that these
two were communists and that they were sticking their heads
together over this communist propaganda.
And Jaern goes on to say, but I got him back.
I told him that I'd seen his daughter hanging out with one of
the Nazi soldiers. And that really got him, he
said. And it really did.
This was a big theme during the war of the women who, for
whatever reason, and they ranged from true love affairs to, as
researchers are sort of now piecing together, that there
really were some relationships in this that stood the test of
time. But in addition, part of
Hitler's policy was that being Aryan people, the Norwegians
should get their genes into the Pan-Germanic gene pool.
So he actually encouraged such relationships, and of course
there was great benefit in such relationships.
Pretty much, people who joined the Nazi party had access to
food and to jobs and to things that other people were rapidly
losing access to. Anyway, Quisling also viewed
with alarm, backed Quisling, the growing number of Jews seeking
refuge in Norway from oppressive regimes in eastern Europe which
were closing down sooner. Aiming to solve these problems,
he applied and received an audience with Hitler in 1939.
Quisling suggested to the Fuehrer that Norway would be better able
to address these problems under Nazi rule, and he requested
Quisling's help. I guess we understand why
Quisling means what Quisling does.
Hitler had his own strategic reasons for invading Norway and
neither informed Quisling nor assigned him a role in the
attack. When he saw, moreover, that
Quisling could not garner widespread cooperation from the
Norwegian people, Hitler sent one of his own trusted leaders,
Josef Terboven, to be the power behind Quisling's puppet regime.
Known as det nye Norge, the new Norway, was how the regime was
known. Along with fear and confusion,
the April 9th, 1940, invasion had brought strict censorship of
all newspapers and radio broadcasts, the principal mass
media of the day. Public meetings, as we've heard,
were also forbidden as was listening to radio broadcasts
from the BBC in London. And there we'd want number 13.
I'll continue mentioning this. He writes in the entry that goes
along with this image. We listen to London late and
early, wrote Jaern to accompany this cut.
And there we see the radio to the right on top.
A daily Norwegian program was beamed towards Norway at 7:30 PM
to tell the allied side of the war.
These BBC broadcasts denied the barrage of reports that
glorified German victories, exaggerated allied defeats and
depicted King Haakon as the runaway ruler who had deserted
his country in its hour of greatest need.
The Nazis freely spread their ideology in the censored press
such as Aftenposten, still Norway's largest paper, as well
as in party-sponsored papers such as --, Free People, and
Norsk Arbeidsliv, Norwegian working life.
The Nazis had begun by making it illegal to listen to the London
broadcasts, but when that didn't work, they confiscated the
Norwegians' radios. Starting with the Jews in May
1941, continuing with the rest of the population in September.
Since Norwegians were required to register all radios at
purchase and subsequently had to pay an annual license fee, the
sets were easy to find. Yet, a surprising number of
Norwegians somehow managed to hide one.
A few took the even more dangerous step of copying down
illegal news broadcasts. These they then typed up after
making as many mimeographed copies as they dared.
This was not without danger. They circulated them as the
so-called Underground Press. Getting caught during any stage
of this operation would reliably lead to jail and unspeakable
torture. Established journalists, too,
found ways to resist, usually by sneaking anti-Nazi messages into
the censored mainstream press. Jaern's son-in-law apparently
did this, and like so many who took such a daring chance only
to see their papers outlawed, Jaern's son-in-law desperately
needed to escape his homeland like many others.
Caught up in such nerve-wracking conditions, how were average
Norwegians who weren't even taking these dangerous choices,
how were they to behave? How would we behave?
Well, the organized resistance gave guidance in this manner.
They sent instructive --, or directives, via London radio and
the Underground Press. Good Norwegians, they said, were
advised they should show the occupiers the cold shoulder.
Refuse to sit beside German soldiers in the movies or on the
street cars. And those who did so were given
fines, by the way. And there's a cut that shows
them being told you better sit there next to that Nazi soldier
or get off. They were also told to give
purposely misleading directions or false information when
answering even the simplest questions, and we see Jaern
doing this. You could also answer I don't
know in English. The diary shows Jaern while he
and his family were briefly evacuated to Brandbu in Hadeland
after the April 9th invasion. Asked directions to a nearby
town by a cyclist, a Nazi soldier cyclist, Jaern calmly
sent him three miles the other way and said he should be back
here, let's see, about six hours, well, you know, he'll be
back in a couple, three hours to where he started and still would
need to get to where he was going.
Did the Nazis have other clues to Jaern's anti-Nazi sympathies?
Whether with good grounds or none at all, the Nazis arrested
Jaern on June 20th, 1941, at the home of a friend.
Meanwhile, other Nazis were interrogating Jaern's wife in
their home. When asked if Jaern received any
newspapers, his wife calmly named the Nazi papers everyone
automatically received, and which, says Jaern, usually ended
up as fish wrap. [LAUGHTER]
Meanwhile, one of the couple's two daughters left to
take a walk, discreetly taking along the underground newspapers
the family did receive and actively read.
Jaern could not escape the long interrogation and imprisonment
the Nazis routinely imposed for even the slightest of crimes.
For this purpose, the Nazis had established a network of prison
camps throughout Norway. By far, the best known of these
was Grini, a large facility located in the Oslo suburb of
Baerum, which came to house many of Norway's foremost
intellectuals. Jaern tells of the horrendous
conditions at the -- prison near Trondheim where his friend
Pierre endured torture and contracted scabies, a parasitic
disease of the skin induced only by filthy surroundings.
By comparison, Jaern was fairly lucky.
Imprisoned near the Oslo suburb of Grorud in a facility named
Bredtvet, he was released only after a few days, but you'll see
in the woodcut that they were pretty sparse surroundings.
Upon his release, he noticed a strange thing.
Suddenly people began helping him in unexpected ways.
They brought his family produce and other necessities right to
their door, and cafe owners would occasionally slip Jaern
and his wife fine food and drink.
Jaern came to realize that this was because they now saw him,
having been imprisoned by the Nazis, as a fellow Jossing.
Jossing was a term that meant a good or patriotic Norwegian, one
who was decidedly anti-Nazi in sympathy and work.
The term originated as a Nazi slur for the cowardly Norwegians
who had liberated British POWs from a German battleship in the
Jossingfjord, which lies near Stavanger.
The event occurred in February 1940, so before the invasion.
But, of course, the invasion set the battle lines sharply.
And the Jossinger themselves adopt the term as a badge of
honor, and we've seen that done in other conflicts around the
world too, redefining the term to mean those who actively
worked to restore the Norway that had existed before the Nazi
invasion. And that pretty much sums up
what the goal of the resistance was.
We want our country that we have worked so hard to make work.
In a country 3% cultivatable, they made it a farming nation
that could survive and survive very well.
In some ways, what happened in Norway this summer on the 22nd
of July and Norway's amazing response to it shows the same
kind of ideal. You're coming in and killing
Norwegians, how will we answer? With hate?
No. With more love.
With more democracy. We want the country back that we
had before July 22nd. Jossinger advertised their views
by wearing symbolic clothing such as the red stocking cap
known as a nisse lave, nisse meaning barn gnome.
It was warn by the barn gnome, a figure who had become a symbol
of Norwegian identity during her period of national discovery a
hundred years before in the 1850s.
Jossinger also wore paper clips, binders as they're called in
Norwegian, to signify the binding together against
Nazism. Wrist watches worn with the face
down declared down with the new time.
[LAUGHTER] And combs protruding
from their pockets denoted their ability to gre, which means to
comb and to manage, themselves without the 'help' of the
occupiers. In time, the Jossings most
identifying symbol became King Haakons' royal monogram, the H7.
This would be carved, scratched along ski trails with ski poles,
knitted into mittens, worn on coins because it's common to put
the king's monogram on coins when he becomes king.
So worn on those coins around their necks, they'd been
confiscated, and etched into every available surface.
Haakon's monograms celebrated his unequivocal 'no' to Naziism.
Meanwhile, the Nazis were not only out to gain the romantic
favor of Norwegian women and monopolize the country's
radically reduced wartime food supply, they also had already
commanded control of Norway's finest homes and most
significant public buildings. Quisling took over the royal
palace for his headquarters. Terboven occupied the residence
of the crown prince family at Skaugum, and the magnificent
landmark known as Victoria Terrasse, with his glorious
towers, turrets, and spires and now home of Norway's foreign
department, was taken over by the infamous Gestapo.
Most of these private homes in public buildings sustained
serious damage, and Jaern has a woodcut showing this in the
process, whether from carelessness or brutality.
School buildings suffered too, and those not damaged in bombing
raids were taken over by the Nazis for their own purposes,
leaving teachers to find other, less suitable locations to teach
their lessons. By late winter, 1941, the
Jossings had begun protesting more boldly, augmenting their
symbols with actions, ranging from outright sabotage to simply
defacing the Nazi posters that had come to monopolize every
public space. With radios confiscated, posters
have become the primary means for spreading Nazi ideology.
One thing dominated: Norwegians could help their own country
best by supporting the Nazi cause.
Norwegians , one poster employed, fight for Norway, join the
Waffen-SS. In other words, go fight on
Hitler's side against the allies, this is how you can help
your country. Who didn't want to help their
country? And how could they know what to
do in the fog of war? More specifically, Nazi posters
urged Norwegians to fight on the eastern front against the Soviet
Union, which Hitler had invaded in June 1941 in direct defiance
of the mutual non-aggressive pact both countries had duly
signed. In all, about 8,000 Norwegians
did register to fight with the Quisling regiment Nordland, as
he called it. And somewhere between 5,000 and
6,000 actually saw warfare. Those Norwegians who did not
become soldiers were also expected to do their part by
turning in their families' blankets, rubber boots,
backpacks, coins and other metal all to support the anti-Soviet
battle, which as Jaern poignantly points out, the
Norwegians never asked for and did not want.
Posters also pressed Norwegians to the seemingly more benign
work service known as arbeidstilsynet.
At first all 19-year-old males, and later females too, were
urged to register for this service voluntarily.
Before long, however, registration became compulsory.
To counteract this development, the organized resistance
reported via London radio that the work registry was actually
put in order to secure young people as soldiers and nurses
for the eastern front. Sign up and you're drafted.
The resistance, therefore, directed young people to avoid
registering for work service by all means possible.
This advice proved prophetic. Jaern tells of Nazis surrounding
a nearby apartment building and arresting young male residents.
And that's one of the woodcuts too.
It was then that Jaern's daughter, having gotten word of
a similar raid, went into hiding.
And this was such a typical part of the occupation.
Family members left sometimes without the rest of their family
knowing where they were and when or if they would return.
Like Jaern's daughter, many young people avoided
registration by concealing themselves.
For some, this meant leaving Norway although, though escape
presented its own serious challenges.
But the dire necessity to get away resulted in several often
reliable methods. One, the so-called Shetland bus,
consisted of a series of fishing boats that would arrive from
Britain to drop off trained resisters and equipment from the
home front, hjemmefronten as it was known, those based in
Norway. And then returned to Britain
bringing escapees, many of whom received training from the SOE,
or the special operatives executive, leaders of the
resistance outside of Norway. A considerable number of
Norwegians escaped compulsory work service by hiding in
Norway's vast wilderness. Gutta i skauen, the 'guys in the
woods' as they became known, became a significant part of
Milorg, the military arm of the organized resistance.
This body, which initially trained the new arrivals from
Britain, would later bomb the building in downtown Oslo that
housed the registration cards of those who had been forced to
sign up for the work service. Resistance grew even further
during 1941, such that the NS Nazi ordinance issued in
February 1942 requiring all teachers to join the Nazi
Teachers' Union met with stead fast resistance.
Teachers rejected especially the demand that they sign a
declaration promising to instruct their pupils in the New
Spirit. The occupiers responded to the
teachers' defiance by closing down all the schools in Oslo.
Then, on March 20th, 1942, Quisling had 1100 teachers
arrested and sent to Norwegian concentration camps.
When the teachers continued to refuse Nazi demands, 500 of them
were shipped off to north Norway, first by cattle car to
Trondheim and from there by boat to Kirkenes, which, if you
picture Norway as a spoon, were way at the top of the handle and
just around the top of it. That's where Norway's border
with Russia is. Crammed on board the small
steamer Skjerstad, capacity 250, all 500 teachers and 50 guards
traveled for 13 days along Norway's coast right on the
North Sea. Though their suffering
ultimately did cause many nominally to join the Teachers'
Union, most continued steadfastly the demand that they
indoctrinate their pupil in Nazi ideology.
In late fall of 1944, Jaern at last saw a hint of the coming
end of the occupation as he watched disabled German soldiers
from the north arriving in Oslo. They had fought on the eastern
front and been defeated by Soviet forces, who then drove
them out of Russia and down through that handle of the spoon
through north Norway. To prevent the pursuing Soviets
from possibly deriving benefit from the people or their
resources left behind in north Norway, the Nazis enforced an
immediate evacuation of all citizens.
Out, out, out. Some hid in caves.
Some went up to the mountains to hide.
Those, too, were searched and they burned down.
And then they burned to the ground all that remained.
Seeing the defeated German soldiers arriving in Oslo, Jaern
could not help but pass along one of the many jokes that
flourished during the occupation.
It's a pun on the foreign minister who drew up the
anti-aggression pact. His name was Ribbentrop,
literally meaning rib bone, the first part of the name does.
The joke reports that the burial ground at -- would soon hold
these German soldiers, hence forth to be known as the
Ribbentrop, the skeleton corpse. At least, Jaern could write of
the last days of the occupation as seen from Oslo.
On May 2nd, 1945, the Nazi controlled newspaper Aftenposten
carried Hitler's obituary. It's author, no less than the
Norwegian winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize for literature Knut
Hamsun, whose name to this day provokes heated controversy for
his loud, outspoken, I should say, support of the Nazis during
the occupation. His obituary praised Hitler for
taking action during his people's darkest and most
difficult hour, but Jaern's accompanying woodcut, number 99,
offers quite a different assessment of Hitler's legacy.
That's it. On May 5th, British forces
commanded by field marshal, this is 1945, May 5th, 1945, field
marshal Bernard Montgomery liberated Denmark.
In Norway, meanwhile, Quisling informed his fellow citizens
that he intended to continue the fight.
He thereby raised the specter that now haunted the allies.
What would happen in a Norway still occupied by more than
300,000 undefeated German soldiers?
The commander of the German garrison in Norway, General
France Bohme, wondered too. And he was both ready and
willing to continue the fight. So when he heard on May 7th at
2:41 AM that the German army had officially capitulated and
reamed France, he found the news hard to accept.
Not until 9:00 PM did he receive his own orders from Nazi
headquarters in Flensburg. Reluctantly concluding that he
and his troops must obey, he announced his decision on
Norwegian radio one hour later at 10:00 PM.
And so it was that as of shortly after midnight, total
capitulation had come also in Norway with plans for the German
soldiers to be marched across the border for internment in
Sweden. Though peace didn't come
officially, you may not have seen this, that's the Haakon
monogram. Anyway, though peace didn't
become official in Norway until May 8th, 1945, Jaern and others
couldn't help celebrating early. Jaern tells of Norwegian flags
flying all over Oslo by 5:45 PM on May 7th.
Many had spent the last few hours repairing their beloved
banners, which suddenly were legal again.
At last, after five long years of Nazi imposed disuse.
Can we even imagine the relief Jaern must have felt to realize
that his words and woodcuts had not fallen to enemy hands, still
safe in their secret compartment.
His precious and parlous account could no longer be used to
threaten his life. All of us who have worked on
this project hope that you, the readers, will revel in Jaern's
sardonic view of his country's World War II occupation by, as
he put it, or as were their self-defining characteristics,
the Nazis, 'master race of cultured heroes who came as
friends to liberate Norway.' Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
>> Let us look at a few more woodcuts, and I would
like to have some of Jaern's words in relation to the
woodcuts that he made for the entries for those days.
Ken Crocker designed the book, as he's designed most of the
books for Borderland Books over the last eight years.
And Ken is at the controls showing the images, and perhaps
during question and answer, if we have time, you might ask
about the design of the book if you have questions about it.
Let's look at number two.
April 9th then, the next day after they leave the cafe, at
6:00 in the morning, I saw for the first time a plane falling
from the sky. It was over the airport in Oslo.
Number seven.
April 11th, in Jaern a horse came galloping, that's at his
house, with a boy on his back. The boy yelled that the farmers
had gathered to meet the Germans and were coming down the road.
They were only two miles away. The farmers gathered with sais,
axes, spades and pitchforks. These were the weapons that they
had to fight the Germans with. Number eight.
Forty-eight farms were burned. The livestock that were saved
stood in the snow up to their bellies.
Twenty-six.
Many have already been shot by now, but the disgraceful
numbers, murders of Hanstein and Wilkstrum cannot possibly be
surpassed. Two well-known resisters.
Thirty.
Today when I arrived at Foss School to start teaching, there
were police guards. One of the teachers had been
attacked and sent to the hospital.
Something like that has happened before.
The attacker came in an automobile, so he must have been
organized. Thirty.
Excuse me, this is for Thirty. Thirty-six.
November 6th, 1941. I went on a bender yesterday
because I couldn't stand to stay at home.
--, his horse, was put down because we could not get proper
food for him. Our dear, dear --.
We were all so afraid the Germans would use him to walk
through the mine fields.
Forty-one.
I was arrested at the home of a friend on June 20th.
Meanwhile, my house was being searched and my wife was
interrogated. The state police asked her,
among other things, if we often received newspapers.
She answered yes, but not as often as before.
The officer asked what papers they were, and she answered the
name of the Nazi papers. These are the Nazi publications
which the florist uses for wrapping paper.
Probably where most of them end up.
[LAUGHTER] Forty-three.
After three interrogations that lasted for four hours, I was
driven to the Nazi prison along with a woman and a friend of
mine. It was is strange feeling to be
in a room that had a door without a door knob.
Just a completely plain door. Still, the worst part of a room
like this is the pail.
That literature was delivered to me was an old dear book, Oil!
by Upton Sinclair. I reread the book and certain
words had been underlined with a fingernail.
Like-minded others have sat here before me.
Forty-six.
On the trolley, the Norwegian passengers were threaten if they
refused to sit next to a German, but people would rather stand.
Kathleen referred to this.
Forty-seven. August 3rd, the king's birthday.
Today at the market the police were clearing the place because
a female vendor was selling beautiful teasing flowers in
support of the king. Outside of the continental, many
people were arrested because they had teasing flowers.
They received a fine of 50 to 100 kronor.
They came back later with a receipt for the paid fine.
Many had been fined double of what the receipt said.
It was a day of great celebration in town.
Fifty-two.
My wife is overly nervous and in need of sleep.
For the most part, she is awakened by dreams.
This evening she woke up after they dreamt that she had been
buried in a bomb shelter. Myself, I sleep like a log.
I wake up more easily from the sound of a car motor than an
airplane. We know the sounds even in our
sleep. We use alcohol to sleep and
Benadryl to stay awake. [LAUGHTER]
Fifty-nine, and this is the cover for the book.
Then the apartment buildings started to burn.
Hundreds of homeless people who had lost everything they owned
fled in different directions away from their houses.
Only the heat and the ruins were left behind.
Ninety-one.
I've had great joy from my secret cabinet.
Twice my house has been searched, and it was not
discovered. Now I have all my woodcuts
secured there. It should be safe if it doesn't
get bombed. And these are the woodcuts that
have survived for us.
Ninety-six.
Now the Germans have barricaded themselves behind rolls of
barbed wire. The guard has hand grenades
along with other supplies. It is not safe to go out after
dark. Explosions go off unexpectedly.
Nearing the end of the war. Ninety-nine.
Kathleen, you may have shown this.
This is the entry, May 2nd. The Fuhrer has fallen.
The newspapers are writing that his actions will remembered for
a thousand of years, yes. We can have hope.
The editorial newspaper said Adolf Hitler stepped forward
during his people's hardest and darkest time when chaos and
anarchy had brought them to the brink.
The irony in his sardonic view.
We'll go to 100, the last image.
The German word, let's see, 102,
the German word for peace, pardon me?
>> It's the Norwegian word. >> The Norwegian word.
The translator is correcting me, so I need to be corrected here.
Monday, May 7th, 4:45 PM. Peace, peace, is not to be
believed. It is feeling that I have never
felt before. I'm not only happy, I'm
delirious. I see people crying.
I understand and I don't understand.
There are flags all over. God only knows where they are
coming from. The first flag I saw was on the
University Library. Since then, they have popped up
all over. It is a sea of color.
Red, blue, and white. Something strange must have
happened. I pinched my arm.
Yes, I am alive, I am awake, and I have permission to speak out
loud.
We want to, at the end, go through all of the woodcuts
rapidly, three or four seconds for each one, so we'll see the
whole array shortly before ending.
May we have the portable?
Is it on? Hello.
I wanted the translator to speak, and she's done her
translation but I think also of interest because we can read
these words now if you do not know Norwegian and also because
of the uniqueness of the translator for us, Solveig.
She was born on April 9th, 1940,
the day of the invasion. And she was born in Stavanger
and was growing up during the period and then came to the
United States and immigrated in 1949.
And I've wanted to ask her a question or two.
[LAUGHTER] She's also my wife.
[LAUGHTER] I have to be very careful.
[LAUGHTER]
You've told me that your house that your father had
built on the edge of Stavanger, Stavanger is on the southwest
coast of Norway, that the Germans, the Nazis, the army,
the soldiers, the military had a camp right across the street,
and I just wanted to ask you about that and what you
remember.
>> They had taken over, there's a farm across the street from us
and they let the people live in the house but they took over the
barn and they had quite a few horses and they took all their
horses and used them for their own.
Being so young, I don't remember much.
I remember more about after the war and the anti-Nazi feeling
that you never talk to anyone who had associated with a
German. You never looked them in the
eye. You look back at it and you
think how awful it must have been for some of these young
soldiers who came over who really believed that they were
protecting Norway, weren't necessarily the Nazis or the SS
troops that we think of. To be totally ignored.
And my mother said there were many times there would be
soldiers across the street, very young, looked like they were 15,
16 years old and they're crying and not understanding why
they're being treated that way. But then you also had the really
nasty ones too. >> Could you say something about
the man that you followed. >> Yeah.
There was a man in our neighborhood that was a Nazi
sympathizer. And Kathleen would know about
this. We had little songs that we
would make up as kids to taunt them, and we would walk behind
and sing these little songs behind them and taunt them all
the way to the bus stop or wherever they were going to go.
>> This is a great opportunity to have history with us.
I can't resist Solveig's history.
[LAUGHTER} Would you say something about
the years after, going back to Norway, you would sail on the
ship and your mother noticing the shoes.
>> Oh, it wasn't my mother. It was a woman actually from a
little town outside of Dekalb from Sycamore, Illinois.
I happened to sit next to her on the plane going back.
I'd been to Norway to visit relatives, came back to the
states, and she said she had taken, there's a trip, it's
called -- and you go up to the coast of Norway and she had gone
on that but she said no one would talk to her.
And this had to be in the '80s. And she said no one talked to
her, no one acknowledged her or anything.
And she heard a group of people talking and they said that
German woman over there. And she said I could understand
Norwegian, I couldn't speak it, and I went over and I said I'm
not a German. I'm Norwegian.
I came back to see where my ancestors were from and asked
why they thought that. And she said the people told her
only German women wear shoes like that.
And that's 40 years later, 35 years later, that still is with
the people. >> The legacy of occupation, for
generations in Iraq or wherever we've occupied, we as Americans
are going to be the Germans as in Norway in that case.
Could you say a little about food and rationing during the
war and after the war. >> Well, you had ration cards
and everything was rationed. I think even clothing was
rationed, wasn't it? Yeah.
And the only way you got white bread or French bread, they
called it, was if someone was sick in the family or you had
very young children then you could have white bread.
And they said the only reason that the Norwegian children were
so healthy after the war was because they still had to take
cod liver oil every day and that helped them.
But I don't think I saw banana until we came over here.
The first time I saw grapefruit, which I thought was a big
orange, was on the way over here.
It was like, I always called it Never Never Land because it was
so different, so far removed from anything in Europe or what
was going on in Europe. >> Could you say something about
taking food over. >> Oh, yeah.
We would go over with, we'd take all the clothes we could and
food, coffee, canned corned beef, ham, sugar, dried fruits,
anything you could take and we'd take it over and then come back
with empty suitcases or usually gifts that our relatives had
given to us. But we did that even into the
'70s until oil was discovered in Norway.
>> Alcohol at that time? >> You always bring alcohol to
Norway. [LAUGHTER]
So it used to be that you could take two bottles.
They didn't say the size. So at that time, and I'm sure
when you went with, you'd buy a gallon of vodka, a gallon of
whiskey, a gallon of gin and we'd bring it over.
And usually we'd give it to my uncles and my grandfather.
The first time Richard came over with me, I brought the same
thing. He'd never been to Norway so I'm
sure he thought there's a bunch of drunks.
[LAUGHTER] And then after we'd
been there a couple of weeks he said whatever happened to all
that stuff we brought over? We're not getting any of it.
And I said they're saving it, it's not for us.
But you still bring a nice bottle of liquor to Norway.
It's very expensive and appreciated.
>> When we go to Norway now, you had relatives that came over
after the war and lived in the Midwest, Iowa, Illinois, and had
a life here and then years later, as working class, and
later went back to Norway as oil was being found in the North
Sea. And now they're our rich
relatives. [LAUGHTER]
It's the other way around. Do you want to say anything at
this point? We have a few more minutes.
If anyone has to leave at this time, this is good.
Those that are here, if you have any questions, we have a
microphone that, are we distributing the microphone or
should we take questions without it?
I will try to repeat it. Just begin.
>> First of all, a comment. I was in Norway in '73 and
alcohol must have gotten in there somehow because
drunkenness was a problem throughout Scandinavia, not just
in Norway.