By Mona Levin
Translated by Haavard Homstvedt, Thanks To Scandinavia scholar
The border clearing in the forest that runs between Norway and Sweden is wide and open. The land border pillar number 35 is painted yellow. Two small flags, the Norwegian and the Swedish, are sway ever so slightly in the autumn air. Seated all around are people dressed in hiking gear with their lunch packs and thermoses. Blueberries cover the ground in the surrounding forest. The blue colour remains visible on the mouths of the children and many adults.
The occasion is the annual commemoration Refugee March, which follows the path through the forest that Norwegian cross border courier used when helping people escape the country during World War II helped not only Norwegian Jews escape the country. Yellow and red fruit punch is served at this boundary marker made of stone. A child is on his way back to his mother, carrying a cup, falls and hurts himself. The punch is spilled, his knee is bruised, and the sound of a child’s cry spreads through the forest. The mother tries to comfort him.
Some 60 years ago, another child’s cry on a trail in this same area put lives in danger. On an icy cold night in November 1942, a group of 11 people, nearly all of them Jews, were guided towards the Swedish border by a cross border courier named Iver Skogstad from Rødenes. A few weeks earlier, all Jewish men had been arrested, and now the Nazis were rounding up Jewish women and children as well. On November 26th, they were all crammed into the German transportation ship “Donau” anchored at Oslo harbour, and deported to concentration camps in Germany. Of the 763 Jews deported, 24 survived.
Some Jews were helped into hiding and were later brought across the border to Sweden along paths, deep in the forest, like the one Iver Skogstad, Arthur Gåseby, and other good Norwegians forged.
This particular group was an eclectic mix of people, including a doctor, a pair of popular and beloved actors, a no-longer-sprightly elderly couple still cherishing life, a couple from Halden of which the husband was not Jewish, and a young mother with her three-year-old child. Through two sleepless days and nights, the mother had tirelessly taught the daughter to use a new name “Kristoffersen” in the event anyone asked her about her name. The Nazis had at this point arrested the mother’s brother. She didn’t know where her parents were, and she didn’t know whether her husband was still under cover or had been arrested and interned.
The train headed for Askim, a city east of Oslo. It was packed with German soldiers and the train station was packed with people – the only entertainment on Saturday nights during the war years was watching trains arrive. A man waiting with a small lantern was to meet the refugees, but had to wait till everybody had left the station before he dared making contact. In a house elsewhere in this city, Askim, this group gathered and were given waffles to eat before being sent out on the road to wait for a truck to pick them up. The truck driver didn’t say one word to the group until suddenly he stopped the vehicle, pointed, and said: “Look down there.”
In a small, tight formation, they moved in the direction of a lake, the Rødenes lake, where someone was waiting with a boat. It was loaded to the gunwale and the layer of ice on the lake broke audibly around the outer edges of the boat. The child cried making some of the group fearful while others panicked.
As the boat passed the middle of the lake, a searchlight suddenly swept over the water. Some German soldiers had deserted the Ørje fortress that same night. The Germans were generally not too eager to patrol the Norwegian forests at nighttime, which allowed most of the refugee trafficking to go unnoticed. On this night, however, they were searching for their own, and the sharp teeth of fear gripped the eleven boat passengers.
On the other side of the lake, across some fields was the Skogstad farm. It is still there today, large and beautiful, surrounded by ample grazing fields. TIver Skogstad, his wife, and their three children always had their house filled with people who needed help crossing the border to safety. They never discussed it among themselves; this was just how it was and how it should be. Their oldest daughter became a border courier to Sweden at age sixteen. Their middle daughter remembers their mother telling her:”If the Germans come, you know nothing. Even if they hold a gun to your head, you know nothing. He won’t shoot you because you’re too young, you see. Even if he says that he will shoot you, you still know nothing.”
The Skogstad’s youngest child remembers the trafficking well, remembers wondering when their father would return, and when they could sleep in their own beds. Often refugees were given to use the family’s beds. Today, Nils Skogstad, who for years was the mayor of Marker County, has made their farm the headquarters for the annual Refugee March in tribute to what took place there.
The farm didn’t have electricity at that time. Mrs. Skogstad prepared food, cleaned, and aided several hundred people that were trying to escape, tended to the upkeep of the farm and the animals. She had to make the farm appear as ordinary as possible while waiting anxiously for her husband to return after putting his life in danger helping people cross the border. In 1944 Skogstad was arrested. He was tortured when he refused to release names. For seven days he was tied up and left alone in a basement in Halden, without knowing whether it was day or night, or whether he would be left there to die. Skogstad did indeed survive. He was marked for life, but lived to be eighty years old.
That November night in 1942, Skogstad opened his home to eleven destitute people. They were given food and rest before beginning to march early the following morning in pitch darkness. It was 15 degrees below (Centigrade) causing black ice. The old-fashioned, stiff leather boots of that time made crunching sounds on the ice. It felt like walking on glass and sounded like an army marching. The hike to the border was a steep and heavy climb upwards through the forest; the refugees had a three-hour journey ahead of them. The young mother carried the child that whimpered and wept and cried out loud from cold and fear.
Skogstad made several offers to carry the little girl, but the girl would have nothing of it, demanded that her mother carry her, and screamed louder. They knew painfully well that German soldiers with dogs were nearby and the doctor insisted on feeding the child sleeping pills in order to avoid detection. The pills were crushed and force-fed to the child with frozen blueberries to ease swallowing. Yet instead of falling asleep, the child became even more scared and more alert. The doctor fed the child more sleeping pills, but the little girl continued crying helplessly. The man and wife from Halden were both carrying poisonous pills; they had agreed on swallowing them if they were captured. At one point, the man threatened to kill the child with his own hands, infuriating Skogstad who would not tolerate any strangling of small children. If people would behave indecently, he would leave the group and force them to find their own way to the border.
The doctor snuck up on the young mother, who dragged herself exhaustedly along as if sleepwalking, tripping, falling and stumbling with the ever-increasing weight of the bundled child in her arms. He tried to force another pill on the child without the mother noticing, but she felt something through her exhaustion, turned around, and there, in the middle of the frozen forest, gave him a loud slap in the face. Then the actor cautiously asked if he might give the child a drop of liquid sleeping aid. Reluctantly, the mother agreed, and when that drop had been swallowed, the crying ceased completely.
At that point, Skogstad relieved the mother of the child; put the little girl in his backpack with her feet sticking out. He removed the child’s little boots and massaged her small frozen feet for the entire last leg of the journey. The child was unconscious and her head swayed back and forth over the rim of the backpack as the pace gradually increased. They were in great haste now. There was no time to lose. Day was breaking. Suddenly shots rang out and they could hear German command calls to the right of the group, hurrying through the forest, gasping for breath.
“Faster! Faster!” Skogstad cried through his teeth.
“How much further?” the child’s mother whispered.
“One hundred meters”, he replied.
“That’s just a lap at the Bislett stadium,” she thought and was reinvigorated.
“The border! Go straight ahead and then right. Remember, right,” Skogstad said. “If you go left, you’ll end up back in Norway.”
He counted the heads of the small group. Nine. He counted again. Nine. The old couple was no longer with them. Skogstad ran back into the Norwegian side. On a tree stump well inside the Norwegian part of the divide, he found the two of them, hand in hand. They had been unable to keep up, and decided to die together instead of being separated from one another. Skogstad managed to get them to safety as well. Before they were able to thank their rescuer, he disappeared across the border, back into occupied Norway.
On the Swedish side, the exhausted, yet relieved refugees were well taken care of. From sheer happiness they burst into laughter and tears. For the young mother, however, the escape felt completely meaningless. Her daughter slipped further and further into unconsciousness. There was nothing the doctor could do.
“I am sorry, ma’m, but your daughter is not responding”, he told her, obviously embarrassed now. In the evening, when they were sitting down for supper, the child vomited all over the doctor. She had managed to stay alive, after all.
By the land border pillar number 35 the child’s crying has ceased and the cup is full of red fruit punch once again. The sermon, given by an old vicar who was himself a border guide as a young man during the war, is over and the hikers are headed out on to the same route where once refugees fled.
At the Skogstad farm a new Mrs. Skogstad, Liv, is inviting everyone into a heated room for a big lunch. We are eleven at the table in one of the dining rooms. One of us, an elderly grey haired woman, is the once young woman who carried her child through the forest that icy winter night years ago, another is myself, a grown woman now, a crying child back then. I whisper to the well-known Norwegian resistance fighter Gunnar “Kjakan” Sønsteby that “ in a way, I can understand that people might get so desperate over a child’s crying that they are willing to resort to such extreme measures.”
“No”, says Sønsteby firmly. “Such things should never be understood. There might be a sort of explanation, perhaps, but impossible to understand. We must never accept behaviour like that.”