Those Germans Kept Good Records

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that an Italian on the fast track to sainthood may in fact be no saint at all. Instead of being the hero who was allegedly Italy’s Schindler, this would be saint may have sent much of his area’s Jewish population to their death at Auschwitz. It appears now that records thought destroyed have surfaced that point to his willing cooperation in identifying and targeting Jews for death. (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/arts/an-italian-saint-in-the-making-or-a-collaborator-with-nazis.html?smid=fb-share)
Yes, those Germans kept good records - having perhaps no sense that things might turn against them and certainly no shame in recording the horrors of their policies.
As a child, I heard firsthand (practically at my grandmother’s knee or perhaps even literarily so though I don’t recall exactly) how German records exposed a shameful family secret. It seems the mother of two boys who had served in the resistance went, after the war, to collect payment due her for one son’s death at the hands of the Gestapo. Careful German records revealed they had released her son to his brother.
Capturing that moment when the mother discovers the awful truth proves tough indeed.

The Gnome in the Rear View Mirror

There’s a parable of sorts they tell in my family, though I think most of them get the whole thing wrong. Like all mythical Norwegian farms, the farm in this story is home to not just the farmer and his wife, but also to a nisse. A nisse is a mischievous little creature not unlike the Gnome of Travelocity. Unless our good farmer leaves out porridge and other goodies during the long, hard and cold winters, the resident nisse will wreak havoc with the livestock, the winter reserves and the spring planting.

In the story my family tells, the farmer has had quite enough of his nisse. So he sells the farm, packs up the pots and pans, hitches up the horses to the wagon and heads for greener nisse free pastures. When he arrives at the new farmstead, he goes to the back of the wagon. There, he finds his nisse sitting quietly at the end of the wagon, dangling his feet happily and balancing the belongings he has tied in a bundle on a stick over his shoulder. 

“We’re finally here,” says the nisse with a wink and a smile.

I always found the story charming and reflected on what I thought was the moral of the story - don’t run away from your problems but face them head-on instead. 

But over and over, every time someone else in the family tells this story, the moral is something else entirely. It’s a warning to never, ever leave where you are and head somewhere else. Never. Ever. Leave. No good will come of it. Yes, we have abandonment issues.

And no good has come of moving, by some measures. My mother left Norway the year they discovered oil for San Francisco. She then left San Francisco the year before real estate boomed. And so on. So the message is clear - stay put, don’t ever leave. And I haven’t, for 28 years.

As you may imagine, I’ve been hearing a lot about that pesky nisse lately. I’ll be looking through the rear view mirror for telltale legs dangling into view and praying my interpretation is the right one.

Nikolas' Ghost

Yesterday was Mother’s Day. Mine was (is) in the hospital, having suffered a “little” heart attack a few days earlier. She’s got her iPad on her lap as she sits propped up in a vinyl recliner. We discuss the latest news from the homeland as she scrolls through Aftenposten online. Inevitably - because it always does - the talk circles round to the ghosts of her childhood (and by extension, mine) - to Nikolas and the war prisoner camp across the street and the parking lot that replaced it and to his final day when he walked out a free man and promptly took his last breath. 

She asks me again whether I ever got an answer from that professor who was supposedly working on cataloging all the camps about this particular camp. I tell her I am still waiting, but no, not yet. Then I suggest Nikolas was better off dying a free man than being repatriated to Russia given the treatment former prisoners of war received. She looks at me blankly as if this were news. And it is in a way. Nobody in Norway wants to talk about what happened after the prisoners went home. I suspect it has something to do with not wanting to come face to face with the reality that it was slave labor that built the roads and railways that the Germans left behind. Nikolas’s labor.

But the ghosts remain, the landscape as haunted as Flannery’s.

Russian war prisoners in Norway