Hanna
About a month after our return to Narvik, they raided the bookshop one night and arrested the women who were working on typing up the next newspaper.
Liv wasn’t there at the time, but it didn’t take them long to find out the names of others who’d been involved and knock at our door, too.
We heard of the arrests from Nina, who’d managed to slip out of a window at the back of the shop and escape.
She’d run straight to our lodgings to warn us, so I had time to hide the wireless at the church, thrusting it into the hands of the priest for safekeeping.
When they searched our rooms, they found nothing, but they had Liv’s name on a list and mine too, by association, so we were bundled into the back of a black van and taken to the police station.
“Remember,” she whispered urgently, as we were driven through the town, “they only know I was involved with the newspaper. Nothing else. I’ll never tell them anything more than that, whatever happens. And you must do the same, come what may. Promise me.”
I nodded miserably. I knew I couldn’t say a word about the wireless, because that would lead them to so many others.
It would be a death sentence for us all.
Our only hope was to let them think we were both involved with the newspaper, but nothing more.
Even that could get us killed, but at least there might be a chance of survival.
And that was what we had to do now. We just had to find a way to survive.
*
We arrived at the camp at Grini in November.
It was bitterly cold. We’d been given thin dresses made of striped cotton to wear, with black cotton squares to tie around our heads.
Liv and I were so-called Nacht und Nebel prisoners—Night and Fog—with the letters NN crudely stitched to our sleeves and on the backs of our dresses.
The Germans had devised this classification for those who had been involved in politically subversive activities, with the intention of making them disappear into the darkness and the mist, depriving them of the normal rights of prisoners.
Unlike other prisoners in the camp, who could receive letters and parcels of food, those of us who were designated NN were allowed no contact with the outside world, and our names were not passed to the Red Cross.
The warden who handed us our prison clothing, having stripped us of our own, told us with grim satisfaction that we’d be given special treatment in the camp to set an example to the other prisoners.
We found out soon enough what that special treatment entailed.
At first, we were put with other prisoners in a four-bed cell in the women’s section of the camp.
Our roommates were Johanna, who was about our age and had been an up-and-coming opera singer before the war began, and an older woman whom everyone called Aunt Sylvia.
Even in her ragged prison clothes, Sylvia carried with her a quiet dignity wherever she went.
She was the wife of a doctor and had been living in Oslo when she was arrested for helping refugees escape to Sweden and Britain.
I thought she looked vaguely familiar, and when she told us her husband had been the King’s doctor and she had started the Bluebells—the first aid organization Mamma had joined—I realized this was Sylvia Salvesen.
Her photo had appeared in a newspaper article before the war, back when the newspapers could be trusted to tell the truth.
She took us under her wing, as she did everyone in our section of the camp, and introduced us to the others when we were put to work sewing khaki shirts for the Germans.
Ingeborg, Kirsten, Margarethe, Lise…most had been arrested for minor offenses, such as listening to foreign broadcasts, wearing a paper clip in their lapel, or—in Johanna’s case—singing a Norwegian national song in public on May 17.
Kirsten, though, had been involved in the production and distribution of an underground newspaper.
She wore the same black headscarf and striped dress with NN on the back as we did.
The others looked at our ragged uniforms with respect. “You NN girls are heroines,” Johanna said. “All I did was sing a song, but you actually made a difference to the resistance.”
“Not really,” said Kirsten. “We’re ordinary women, fighting for what is right. Just like everyone else here.”
I think it was Aunt Sylvia’s idea to stitch the names into a scarf.
She showed it to us one day. “We must keep a record,” she said.
“One day it may be needed, to tell the world we were here.” She passed it to Liv, saying, “Put your names on, too. You have the finest sewing of anyone here.” Once Liv had added our names, she handed it back, and Sylvia quickly folded it into a pocket of the coat she wore, waiting until she had an opportunity to smuggle it out via one of the Norwegian doctors whom she’d befriended in the hospital.
I kept my eyes on the task in hand, taking satisfaction for once that my stitches were crude and clumsy and the shirts I worked on would probably soon fall apart.
Liv and I could never let on about my work as a wireless operator, even among our friends in the camp, knowing how much more trouble it would get us into.
I wondered whether Euan knew of my arrest. I supposed he must have heard of the disappearance of yet another wireless operator.
Perhaps some other girl was already being spirited away across the sea on the Shetland Bus, to be trained as my replacement.
I realized what a lifeline my work had been for me.
Despite the constant fear, I’d felt connected to the world beyond Norway’s borders, but now that thread of connection had been cut.
Feeling isolated and helpless was far worse than running the risk of discovery and execution.
I tried to draw strength from the stoicism of Liv and the other women in the sewing room.
The designation of Nacht und Nebel meant we were soon moved to labor in the fields beyond the camp’s barbed-wire fence, pulling turnips from the frozen mud.
Liv succumbed to bronchitis, and although I tried my best to care for her, and Aunt Sylvia managed to procure a little medicine from the camp’s hospital, she became too ill to work.
One day I asked the German warden who was marching us to our day’s work if Liv could stay in bed to rest a little. She laughed in my face. “You think this is a holiday camp, do you? Well, in that case, you can both have a little rest. Let’s see how you like solitary confinement for a while.”
We were put into separate cells, barely six feet wide and bitterly cold.
I gave thanks, though, that we were spared the hard physical labor that had taken its toll on Liv’s health.
At least we could rest, although our diet was reduced to a scant piece of bread and a bowl of watery soup each day, shoved through a narrow aperture in the door that was quickly slammed shut.
Now we were completely cut off from the world.
I missed the camaraderie of the sewing room, and I even missed laboring in the fields, where at least we could see the sky and breathe the fresh air in the company of others.
The cells had tiny windows high up on the wall.
By standing on tiptoe, I discovered I could just see the top branches of a single birch tree beyond the opposite block.
Its bare twigs were just visible in the lights of the camp, against the backdrop of winter’s darkness, and they gave me a little hope, reminding me of the Grouse Tree and the way nature can endure even the harshest of winters.
My neighbors and I would tap on the walls, when we thought the German wardens were out of earshot, keeping one another company. And because I knew Liv was also in solitary confinement, I found I didn’t feel quite so alone there after all.
One day I was straining to try to see a little more of the tree, when I heard a whisper from the window next to mine. “Is that Hanna?”
“Yes,” I whispered back. “Who are you?”
“It’s Kirsten. From the sewing room. Your sister is in the cell on the other side of mine.”
I was overcome with happiness to know Liv was so close by.
“I can pass her a message, if you like,” Kirsten whispered.
And so we were able to send each other a few words of encouragement back and forth.
After a while, they caught Kirsten at it, and she was given a beating, but then they returned her to the same cell where she carried on whispering, undaunted, even though we couldn’t bear to think she might be punished again on our behalf.
Sometimes I could hear the conversations of other prisoners passing beneath the block, their feet crunching on the frosted ground.
I recognized the voices of Johanna and Sylvia and, as they walked by, they would deliberately speak a little more loudly, saying things to help those of us in the solitary cells keep our spirits up.
Occasionally there were snippets of news from the outside world, too, presumably passed on by newcomers to the camp.
“Did you hear there was a raid on the power station at Glomfjord?” I heard Johanna remark clearly one day. “The Germans are furious. It was right under their noses.”
I smiled, wondering whether that could have been the raid Euan had been involved in planning when I’d last seen him at the hut.
I’d lost track of the days, but one afternoon I heard voices below my window again, and suddenly the sound of singing floated upward.
I recognized Johanna’s pure soprano, then others joining in, singing a song we used to sing on Christmas Eve.
Mitt hjerte alltid vanker…My heart will always wander.
The words made the walls of my cell evaporate as I was transported back to all those times before, when we’d sung around a table laden with good food and gifts, safely wrapped in our parents’ love.