World War II Remembered

A Child in Norway Under the Nazis

232 Iwas playing with my brother Peder in a field near our house in Norway on April 9, 1940, when we looked up and saw the sky filled with airplanes. I was seven years old and Peder was eight. We had never seen so many airplanes. We tried to count them and couldn’t. We ran to the house. The planes were headed for Oslo, we learned. It was the beginning of the Nazi Blitzkrieg. A few days later, friends of my parents who were Jewish came from a townsouthofOslotostaywithusforashorttime.They,likeeveryoneelse, had heard about Krystallnacht and the terrible persecutions of the Jews in Germany. If there was a chance that the Nazis might take over Norway, they did not feel safe in their home. In those early days, they made it safely to Sweden. (Krystallnacht was the night of November 9, 1938, when Nazi storm troopers and Hitler Youth began a two-day pogrom, trashing and looting Jewish shops and synagogues all over Germany.) Norway, which had hoped to remain neutral, was in turmoil for about two months. Germany wanted naval bases that would break the A Child in Norway Under the Nazis • Agnar Pytte Agnar Pytte, right, with brother Peder, 1940 A Child in Norway Under the Nazis: Agnar Pytte 233 Allied blockade and help her invade England, and she also wanted the iron ore that came out of Narvik, a city far to the north near the coast. The British sent ships to try to stop the invasion of thousands of German troops, but the English were in a weakened condition, and the operation was not the success that either Norway or England had hoped for. Nonetheless, the Nazis were held back long enough to allow the Norwegian parliament to take a hasty vote for a government in exile and also to allow King Haakon VII and his family to escape to England on a British ship. The British withdrew on May 28, 1940, and Norway surrendered to the Germans on June 10, after holding out against the Blitzkrieg longer than any other European country. During this time Neville Chamberlain resigned and Churchill became Prime Minister. Of course I learned all that later. I was too young at the time to be aware of anything except the anxieties of my parents and the stories they told. While Norway was struggling, thousands of young men took to the sea and sailed out of the fjords to England. The parts of the Norwegian navy and air force that had not been lost also went to England, where they could organize a resistance operation. Men were trained as pilots and as parachute troops. And this is where my family came in. My father owned an extensive tract of wooded land in the mountains, where he ran a lumbering business. Our family of six consisted of my mother, my father, and four boys. We lived in the town of Hvittingfoss on our farm, which was called “Pytte” and had belonged to the family for many generations. After the Germans took over the government, my father became active in the resistance. The Nazis confiscated all guns and also all radios : they did not want people to know about the progress of the War. However, my father had a radio that he kept hidden in the attic, and every night he went upstairs to listen to the BBC. Messages would come through in code. One phrase I remember is, “The wolf will howl tonight ”: that meant that British planes would fly over the mountains in the dark and look for signal fires set by my father and his friends. When the pilots saw a fire, they would release parachutes carrying men, weapons , and explosives. The men on the ground would be ready to help the parachutists and to take them and the things they were carrying to a 234 World War II Remembered safe hiding place before dawn. Of course this was very dangerous work, and I worried constantly that my father would be killed. Because we grew most of our own food, no one could keep track of whether we were consuming extra rations; also, once a week a man who sold fish came to the house with his truck. So we did not experience the food shortages that were common in most of the country. My older brother Peder and I slept upstairs in a large room that had...