Our new ”leaders” understood that to make Norway a part of the “New Order” in Europe, it was essential to gain control over school administrators and teachers and reform the entire educational system from kindergarten up to the university level. It soon became clear that they would try to secure control over all professional and labor organizations, and then replace the Norwegian Parliament with a new “Riksting”. After that they could “legally” conclude a peace treaty with Germany and mobilize Norwegian youth.

The arrest of teachers became the test case in this grandiose plan. In the fall of 1940 the new Minister of Education tried to make the teachers sign a declaration of loyalty in which they promised to teach their students according to Nazi ideology and also in their private lives promote this ideology. A teacher who refused to obey the order would have to resign immediately.

However, the teachers were prepared and agreed to reply with a formula stating that they now, as before, would be guided in their teaching by their conscience and the principles they as teachers had committed themselves to follow. From then on the teachers answered all threats and demands with this formula and the Nazi government did not get anywhere with them as long as they all stood together.

In the meantime the teachers associations had been dissolved, but they were hurriedly replaced by an underground organization that continued the work in basements in the cities. Thanks to this networking  the teachers could continue to put up a united front against the Nazi demands, and most important of all, each individual teacher could be assured that if anything should happen to him in his resistance against the oppressors, his family would be taken care of financially through funds collected for that purpose.

In the spring of 1942 Quisling decided that he now had to crush the teachers resistance once and for all or give up all hope of bringing Norway into the “New Europe.”

In March the mass arrest of teachers began. My father and two of his colleagues in Eidsvoll, all unwilling cooperators under the new regime, were among them. The arrested teachers were sent in cattle cars to prison camps in Norway, subjected to harassment and severe punishment and told there would be more of the same, unless they signed the loyalty declaration. The overwhelming majority of the teachers refused to submit. Then the prisoners, now about 700 of them, were crowded like slaves into two small ships and transported to Kirkenes,north of the Arctic circle, where they had to do forced labor for the Germans, especially road work and unloading of ammunition  while being exposed to Russian bombing attacks. Working and housing conditions were miserable,  food inadequate and just barely edible, but the local population were able, openly or covertly, to get some food delivered to the prisoners.

The brutal treatment of the teachers created a wave of indignation in the free world. The Nazis probably felt that this act of terror backfired on them, because in the fall, as the rough weather was beginning to set in, they started sending the first teachers home. The ship my father was in, was close to being hit by a Russian bomber. According to one of the officers on board, one bomb just missed the ship due to a two seconds’ timing error. Most of the teachers were gradually reinstated in their jobs without having to sign a declaration. The battle had been won. The attempts to nazify Norway had suffered a severe setback.

VIII a

The teachers receive the "Hinlegen treatment".

Crawling on your elbows was a challenge, especially in the snow.

Drawing from “Kirkenesferda“.

VIII b

Photo by Cynthia Brakstad

This plaque on a wall in Kirkenes says:

Erected by Norwegian teachers
In gratitude for all help the people of Sørvaranger gave to the
636 teachers in German captivity
4/28-11/4 1942

IX a

The Norwegian press was under strict German censorship, but once in a while the censors would be taken off guard and slip something through. The headline in this news paper deals with some people who had stolen masses of ration cards.(Picture IX)  “Accidentally” it was placed on top of a picture of some top German officers. It says: “I wish I could wring their necks.” The editor of the paper was called in to the Nazi chief of police and had a hard time explaining that the placement of the headline was entirely due to an unfortunate accident, and he escaped being shipped to a prison camp by the skin of his teeth.

IX b

This second clipping is a personal ad in the Quislings’ main paper “Fritt Folk”. It says: “NS-girl, 23, wishes to know a NS soldier fighting on the German front or a NS gentleman. Exchange photos. RE: Cozy times on Bjørnøya.” The interesting thing here is that Bjørnøya was the Arctic island we non-Quislings had decided to send all the NS traitors to after the war.

X

All of a sudden a picture book started selling like hotcakes, “Snorre Sel” by Frithjof Sælen. Because of its hidden messages it became an underground bestseller. We were amused by the fact that the Germans missed the symbolic content of the book and were full of praise for it. According to Astrid Sælen, the author's daughter, two anonymous letters eventually informed the Nazi authorities about what its figures represented, and the book was banned. It instantly became an underground bestseller. Strangely enough, a German newspapers had a very favorable review of it 7 months after it was banned! Astrid Sælen found some notes left by her father about " the right hand not knowing what the left is doing". Besides writing, Frithjof Sælen became involved in some highly risky resistance activities and had to escape to England in 1944.

In the picture above, what should be an obvious clue, is the shape of the ice floe, suspiciously similar to a map of Norway. Snorre the seal played happily on the ice, jumping from one floe to the other, paying little attention to the dangers around him, or he was just lying around dreaming.

XI

The more we studied the book, the more we found that could be applied to the current situation in Norway: Sving and Svang were two seagulls. Snorre’s mother did not like them. They had such a false yellow look in their eyes and some red marks on their foreheads (The Quislings wore swastikas on their caps and on their uniforms). Their seagull family did not want to have anything to do with them anymore. They were up to no good. “Skui, skui”, they shouted and flapped their wings (The Quislings said “Heil og sæl” and raised their arm, imitating the Nazi greeting “Heil Hitler”) Snorre’s mother certainly did not like these types and she warned Snorre against them.

XII

And there was the killer whale Glefs (Picture XII) with his mouth full of huge, sharp teeth. (Germany armed to its teeth!) Sving and Svang let Glefs know that if he wanted a piece of yummy steak, they knew where he could find it. In the story we also identified England, Uncle Bart, the walrus, and the Soviet Union, Brummelabb, the Bear. The story had a happy ending for Snorre, for us, but not for Glefs and the Germans. The price of the book skyrocketed on the black market.

By 1943 the situation in the country was becoming increasingly tense. We heard about arrests of people every day, executions of persons suspected of sabotage, whole villages on the coast being burned down as reprisals where the Allies had attacked German positions from the sea. 700 Norwegian Jews had been transported to Germany. Food was getting scarce and the stores empty. In addition to its own population Norway had to support masses of German troops, who, of course, took the best of everything for themselves.

At the University of Oslo, which I then attended, conflicts were escalating. Our president had been replaced with a Nazi sympathizer, students who were NS members obtained special academic privileges, several professors and about 70 students who protested the reorganization of the university had been arrested. The rest of us sent letters of protest and marched in the streets.

On November 30th I was studying in one of the university reading halls. There was unrest in the air that morning. A written note had been passed from person to person with this message:  “The Germans are coming at 11 o’clock.. Get out! “ However, there had been so many false rumors circulating that fall, and most of us continued studying.

But as the 11 o’clock hour approached, it was getting more and more noisy where I sat, and I decided I might as well leave. As I opened the main door I saw soldiers with rifles in hand on the university plaza. I shut the door, ran down into the basement and exited through a back door leading to the garden. I had climbed the fence, ready to jump, when a soldier with a rifle shouted at me and pushed me back.

We were all crowded into the Aula, the university assembly hall. (This is where the Nobel Peace price ceremonies take place .) After we had been sitting there for hours, wondering what this was all about, an impressively decorated German police boss told us in a thunderous voice that we had been arrested because we had attempted to set fire to the Aula. And he showed us how some walls had been partially repaired after the arson attempt This was news to most of us, but we knew that it was common German tactics to create provocations like this to furnish them with an excuse to get at someone. (Example: “The Reichstag fire” that helped Hitler assume power in Germany)

XIII

We were transported by train to Larvik, south of Oslo, and then made to march and run into the dark night while angry guards hollered and mad dogs barked. We finally arrived at a large building, which had just been emptied after housing Russian prisoners.

They packed us all, about 1000 of us by then, into this old dirty building, where we had to sleep three on each mattress the first night. After a few weeks there they started shipments to Germany, one group at a time. I was supposed to go with the last shipment. But that day I was sick with some sort of a stomach flu, so with about 30 others, who also had a fever above a certain level, I was lined up in front of the S/S Donau, the ship used to send prisoners to Germany. The Germans were worried about infections, so they kept us apart from the rest, saying that we would be sent to Germany when we had recovered. We were surprised and relieved when we found that they decided instead to send us to Grini, a prison camp outside Oslo.

We found out later that our friends had been sent to special prison camps in Germany, where they were going to be “reeducated” and shaped into good Nazi leaders and officers to serve as models for Norwegian youth. They received better food than regular prisoners and enjoyed certain privileges, but they were exposed to serious diseases, so many died in captivity or after they were released at the end of the war.

Grini at Bærum, north-west of Oslo, was a former women’s penitentiary that was rebuilt as a prison camp by the Germans. It consisted of a large main building housing administrative offices, a section for women prisoners and one for solitary confinement.

The bulk of male prisoners were confined in barracks surrounding the main building.

Grini was the largest prison camp in Norway. Many prisoners regarded as dangerous were housed here while undergoing interrogation and torture at Victoria Terrace, the Nazi police headquarters in Oslo. After that some were executed, some sent to Germany, others to various smaller camps in Norway, but many remained at Grini for years, often for inexplicable reasons.

XIV

This drawing (XIV) by professor Heintz, who was my roommate for a while, tells something about the spirit at Grini. We did not exactly overexert ourselves when we were doing work for the Germans. The second signature on the left page is that of professor Arnholm, who stayed in the same room.

XV

Picture XV and the following five drawings are from ex-prisoner J.B.Schive Nielsens book: “Fronten bak piggtråden”. The first one shows “New Arrivals” to Grini.

We arrived in the camp in the beginning of January 1944. As we were marched up to our barracks, we passed a group of men who obviously had been mistreated. Some of them were in such bad shape that they could barely walk, others had to be carried on stretchers. We learned that these men were returning from Victoria Terrasse where they had been interrogated. The next morning we were visited by an old prisoner, who gave us a brief orientation to our new “hotel”. Among other things, he told us not to trust anyone we did not know in the camp, because every 10th prisoner was a spy and would report on us to the Germans. So our first impressions of Grini were not exactly pleasant.

XVI

Each room in the barracks had a wood stove and  two story bunk beds along the walls. The size of the clientele increased dramatically while we were there, and it was not long before there were three  bunks stacked on top of each other. With about 30 people packed into each room the snoring and other noises during the night took a while to get used to and the air quality was not for people with sensitive noses. I am not even going to describe what the situation was like during the night when we all had diarrhea at the same time and were locked up in the barracks with minimal bathroom facilities.

Every room elected one man to be in charge of food distribution and keeping the room clean and in acceptable order, the “inneman”, the “roomkeeper”. He was the only person allowed to be inside the barracks during working hours.

The longer you stayed at Grini, the more you thought about food, because our intake was kept at a level well below the required minimum: About a quarter of a loaf of bread a day, and to go with the bread a dash of red caviar (dubbed “russian terror “). For dinner “blomstersuppe” (“flower soup”) which consisted of lots of water with some cabbage and pieces of other indeterminable vegetation in it, and potatoes. The “innemann” would divide the potatoes in equal portions and line them up in rows with a number attached to them on the table, so they could be distributed in an absolutely fair manner as in a lottery. This was extremely important. If one person would judge his potato allotment a little smaller than someone else’s, severe grievances might ensue. We were always hungry. So hungry, in fact, that when we had a chance, we would fish up a piece of old moldy bread or some other discarded food from one of the German’s garbage cans to get something that would fill our stomachs.

A fellow student, who had been caught for participating in a military organization, an offense punishable by execution, found a dead crow in a ditch when he was doing some road work. He fried it over a bonfire and said it tasted delicious.

We were allowed now and then to receive a package from home with a limited amount of basic clothing, but no food, except for cod-liver oil.

When I later studied psychology, I often thought about our reaction to food deprivation at Grini as an illustration of the psychologist Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”. He states that when our basic survival needs are unfulfilled, like needs for food, water, safety, they override all other needs higher up in the hierarchy, for example the need for sex (a survival need for the species, but not for the individual), the social needs for love, self-esteem, friendship, acceptance, etc A person cannot spend much time worrying about his acceptance by the group when his survival is at stake. At Grini it was as if neurotic behavior became a luxury we could not allow ourselves to indulge in! It was also an interesting phenomenon that we young men would typically dream about sitting at a table gorging ourselves with food rather than having recurring dreams about sex.

XVII

On the wall in our barracks our work schedules were posted. Here is an example of a summer schedule. In winter we started a little later in the morning:

5:30 Wake up call
5::35 Get dressed, wash, make beds
6 – 6:30 Breakfast
6:35 March to roll call area
6:45 Roll call
7 –12 Work
12 –12:50 Dinner
12:55 – 18 Work
18 – 18:10 March to roll call
18: 15 Roll call
19:20 –19:40 Supper
  Practice making beds
  Straighten up clothing cabinets
  Polish shoes and fix clothing
20:45 Get ready for roll call in the barracks
21 - 21:30 Roll call
21:30 - 22 Free time
22 Quiet

Zeidler,
Commanding Officer

We were put to work outside maintaining roads, repairing buildings, cutting and stacking wood , working on the Grini farm in the outer area of the camp. etc, or we worked inside in the carpentry shop, the bookbindery, the kitchen, the hospital, cleaning up buildings, etc.

XVIII a

XVIII b

There was a good deal of sabotage in the form of foot dragging going on, especially in jobs where we were making things useful to the Germans. As these pictures indicate, when a guard was approaching, all hands were busily at work. When the guard left and was out of sight, everybody relaxed and took it easy.

Reading and writing were “verboten”, so were group activities like singing, music, and giving lectures. But in the evenings, after we were locked up in our barracks, all these “illegal” activities and more went on. One of us would serve as a guard by the main door, and he would give a signal if there were signs of Germans approaching, and they were usually pretty loud and easy to detect. As soon as a warning was given, the ongoing activity was stopped immediately and books, writing paper, and instruments, quickly put back in their hiding places behind a board in the wall, under the floor, etc. Some of these forbidden items had been smuggled in with help from prisoners working in the transportation department.

XIX

We had talents of various kinds among us. Professor Francis Bull, a specialist in literature, would give lectures where he quoted entire pages by heart from books by Ibsen,  Bjørnson and other classical works, and we were entertained by singers, violinists, writers and comedians. This drawing is from a lecture session where the topic is a drama at sea.

Some times we celebrated birthdays, national holidays or other special occasions.  We would share some food that had been smuggled in often supplementing it with potato peel “lefse” fried on top of the wood stove, or plain potatoes with cod-liver oil, which became a delicacy when you were sufficiently starved for fat. Some people became unbelievably creative in making dishes out of tidbits from a variety of sources, and almost anything tasted wonderful to us. (As a saying went at Grini: “Everything tastes good, just so you get little enough of it”).  And even if it should not taste so great, at least it filled our stomachs.

XX

The solitary cells in the main building (“Haft”) were used for prisoners who were to be executed or who were severely punished for “verboten” activities in camp. Sometimes we would sneak up to the building and secretly communicate with someone who was to be executed the following morning. It was a heartrending experience, but after some time at Grini one became blunted emotionally, so even feelings stirred up by these tragedies became quickly repressed.

For most of us this emotional dullness would affect feelings overall: Joy, happiness, anger, fear and anxiety. For example, when I worked on the farm , which was situated beyond the inner camp area, I would occasionally be able to “steal” some potatoes the Germans had set aside for themselves, wrap them in some cloth and hide them under my pants above my boots. I would then march through the gate under the scrutinizing stares of the guards without worrying much about the risk involved, a stay on “Haft” or being sent to Germany. It took months after my release to get in touch with my normal feelings again.

For us thirty or so “Aula fire students”, the worst punishment during captivity was the scarcity of food and the uncertainty, not knowing what our captors would do with us. Interviews with torture were usually inflicted on prisoners whom the Germans suspected to possess valuable information about sabotage activities. Since we had been arrested basically for non-violent resistance and a trumped up charge, they were less interested in us and contented themselves with letting us undergo the routine treatment and harassment that was part of life at Grini. For instance all of a sudden they would sound the alarm, line us up outside and let us stand there for hours at a time, sometimes in rain or snow, and without giving us a clue about what we were waiting for. Eventually a decorated officer might appear and rage about some trivial infraction, someone having been caught inside the barracks during working hours, or some similar “crime.” Sometimes, the punishment could be rough, push-ups until we were exhausted, or “Hinlegen” in the middle of the night, which consisted of running (“Los! Los! .“ Fast.! Fast!), throwing ourselves flat on the ground and then crawling on our elbows through dirt, mud and puddles, plus other fiendish acrobatics. After one of the more severe penalty exercises of this sort, one fellow in his forties died from exhaustion. But since most of us in the student group were young and healthy, we recovered relatively quickly after these “treatments .‘

XXI a

XXI b

Photos XXI a + b were taken by a prisoner through a window in the carpenter shop with a camera that had been smuggled in. The top picture shows a group of prisoners “at work “ with no Germans in sight. In the second photo a prisoner is greeting an officer nicknamed “Bestefar” (Grandfather). We had to greet all Germans with “Mützen ab”, a procedure consisting of the following routine: Quickly removing cap with right hand, pressing cap firmly to right thigh, standing at attention or walking with the correct military posture past the member of the master race while all the time looking him straight in the face. Failure to do so would lead to severe punishment. Of course we never greeted a guard more correctly than when we carried some contraband on our bodies.

For a couple of months I was “Innemann” for the professors’ room. Our captors had at that time segregated the prisoners according to various criteria, and some had to wear certain insignia on their uniforms: Jews had to display a star (some Jews who had fought for the Germans in WWI were “rewarded” with incarceration  at Grini rather than in Germany), hostages wore a white triangle on their coats,, and some prisoners a yellow one. (We were never quite sure why). Prisoners under a certain age were put in one building, and one day it was announced that there would be separate barracks for “intellectuals”. The Germans apparently believed in the slogan ”Divide and Conquer”.

Professors and students were among those housed in the “Intellectual Barracks”. For me it was a great experience to get to know these professors personally, many of whom were internationally known for their work. For example: Professor Francis Bull loved French drama, and when he found out that I had a copy of “La Phedre” among the books in the bookcase I was arrested with, and which now was locked up in a store room, he managed through his connections (he had been at Grini for a long time and knew his way around) to get hold of the book and secure a room in the building where we could sneak off to read the French dialogues aloud, he reading one role and I another.

XXII a

XXII b

Pictures XXII a+b are copies from my illegal Grini notebook, showing a drawing by professor Heintz of a watch tower by the inner fence and a poem by Bjørnson which professor Bull wrote down. The number 480 on top of the page preceding the name was one of the lowest I saw in the camp. My number was 9464, so I was a newcomer in comparison. The poem describes a time of oppression and deprivation in our country’s past, but ends on a hopeful note speaking of the times of light and freedom that are soon to come.

About midsummer 1944 a student from our group was released. It came as a surprise, and we did not know why. It was getting very crowded at Grini by then, and that may have had something to do with it. Some more releases followed throughout the fall, and then one morning, the day before Christmas Eve, the unbelievable happened: I heard my number being called out over the loudspeaker during the line up. I was free! It took a while before it penetrated!

XXIII

So the next day I arrived home as a surprise Christmas present. My family thought I looked reasonably well, in spite of my rather puffy face, a result of a diet consisting mainly of water. They laughed at me for a while because I automatically knocked on doors before opening them, our signal at Grini to let people inside know that the person opening the door was not a German.

To avoid being recruited to do compulsory work for the Germans, I took a job as a woodcutter for a local farmer, since farm work would exempt you from that. After a couple of months, I was contacted by the resistance movement, and got some small jobs to do. One I especially remember, consisted of transporting a typewriter that was used for typing underground newsletters from one part of the county to another. I decided that if I did it openly and in a matter of fact way it might arouse less suspicion. Part of my route went next to the German headquarters in the area, and I tried as hard as I could to look casual and bored as I bicycled through there in the middle of the day with the typewriter on my handlebars. Luckily there were no Germans on the road then.

In the beginning of May 1945, just before the armistice, I received an order to meet early in the morning at a farm outside Eidsvoll with some other members of the resistance movement. Here we received weapons and were assigned tasks to perform when the Germans capitulated, which they were expected to do in a day or two.

XXIV a

XXIV b

Pictures XXIV a+b were taken the day before the capitulation. In the top photo I can be seen standing to the left with my US carbine, shipped via parachute drop, and on the second picture I am in the front row to the right.

Since I was a newcomer in the group, and my military training had been minimal, the group leaders decided to make use of me as a messenger, interpreter and guide for the allied troops when they arrived.

There were several hundred thousand Germans in the country. We did not know the exact number at the time and were not sure how many there were of us.. (About 40 000, we learned later). We realized that it would take Allied troops several days to arrive in Norway after a German capitulation, and that until they came, we would operate pretty much on our own. It would be our task to help facilitate an orderly transition from German to Norwegian administration and minimize violence, if possible.

It took some time for us to believe it when we on the 8th of May, finally, received the news that Germany had surrendered unconditionally, but soon our initial hesitation changed to boundless excitement. There was one big question on our minds, however: With their overwhelming military superiority, how would the Germans react to us when we appeared in the open? They could wipe us out in no time.

As it turned out, the transition went more smoothly then we had expected. The German soldiers had learned to blindly obey orders from their superiors. When they were told to surrender, they did so. Besides they were deadly tired of the war and wanted to go home. So overall the surrender took place without major incidents throughout the country.

When a messenger brought us the armistice papers that were to be presented to the German Headquarters at Eidsvoll, one man from our group was selected to carry out this task, and I was to accompany him as an interpreter. I must confess that it was with some trepidation that we ventured into the lions den, walked by the tanks and the heavily armed troops up to the Commanding Officer and handed him the documents. But after a brief greeting and explanation of our errand, we went through the formalities without incident.

XXV a

XXV b

One of our our tasks during the following days was to help the Norwegian police round up some of the more prominent Quislings and transport them to jail and also to guard major communication centers and public buildings. Picture XXVa shows two of our boys guarding the former Nasjonal Samling Headquarters in Eidsvoll and XXV b the resistance forces patrolling the Eidsvoll railroad station. We had no uniforms, just a windbreaker and an armband. But we got the job done. A couple of days later the boys who had fled to Sweden and received military training there, 10 000 of them, arrived and joined us in the peace keeping.

XXV c

This photo (XXV c) catches the first jeep arriving in Eidsvoll. Finally the British were here! I was assigned as an interpreter and guide to a unit of “Red Devils”, British parachute troops. These boys had seen a lot of action, some were survivors from the famous battle at Arnhem, and over the years they had suffered very heavy losses. These soldiers were young, and the highest ranking officers in the unit were about 25.

I traveled with them all over the eastern part of Norway, where they were rounding up Gestapo members (Nazi police) who had hidden in military camps among regular soldiers or in the woods. Another job they had was to check the mapping of country roads, so I accompanied them in their jeeps on some wild trips over barely existing mountain roads and paths where a motorized vehicle never before had ventured. (And probably never since ). They were tough, often reckless guys, drove wildly, and one of them ran off a curvy road north of Eidsvoll and was instantly killed. But for me, of course, it was a new and exciting experience.

XXVI

Role reversal at Eidsvoll Highschool. (Picture XXVI) The “rektor”, headmaster, who was in charge when my father and his three colleagues were arrested, is here seized by the Resistance and brought to jail. He was a prominent Nazi in the area. When the school restarted in the fall, my father was appointed in his place. The former “rektor” was brought to trial and sentenced to some time in jail, lost his right to work in Norwegian schools, but, after long court hearings, finally was allowed to keep his right to a livable pension. He was lucky not to suffer the “justice” of the system he had represented!

XXVII

Oslo was jubilant as never before when the King returned. (XXVII)

XXVIII

In Eidsvoll my father gives the 17th of May speech in front of the building where the Norwegian Constitution was adopted in 1814. (XXVIII) It goes without saying that the 17th of May had meaning for us that year!

Picture sources

The pictures in this collection are based on slides I showed to my Sons of Norway classes and other groups interested in Norway and Norwegian culture.

I thank the publishers and individuals mentioned below for permission to use photos and drawings:

The photos of my family and the pictures showing the Resistance in action in the Eidsvoll area, unless otherwise indicated, were taken by photographer Lars Bry, who was a member himself of the underground movement and also a friend of my parents. Bry was unmarried, now deceased, and I have contacted photographer Knut Bry, a nephew, and obtained the permission of relatives to use the photos for non-commercial purposes.

I have obtained permission from Astrid Sælen, daughter of Frithjof Sælen and the present copyright owner, to use the three pictures from Snorre Sel. The book has been reissued this year by Pax Forlag, Oslo. An English translation is out of print, but plans are being made for a new edition. Bergen visitors who wish to find out more about Snorre Sel, other books by Frithjof Sælen, and the exciting war time activites of the author, should visit the exhibition in Rekstensamlingen, Statsminister Michelsens vei 34, Paradis, Bergen.

Cappelens Forlag, publisher of ”Norge under Haakon VII”, writes me that they have no records showing the sources of the pictures I have used from their book taken from contemporary newspapers (printed in Sweden?) Pictures involved are numbered VI, IX,XIII, XXI, and XXVII.

The drawings from Grini are from “Fronten bak piggtraaden” by J.B.Schieve Nielsen. His son, Bjørn Jacob Nielsen, has given me permission to use the six drawings I have selected from the book for non-commercial purposes. The drawing VIII is from “Kirkenesferda”, edited by S.Amundsen in 1946, a non-profit publication with unpaid contributions from teachers, all ex-prisoners.

Bremerton, January 28, 2005
Olav Brakstad.