We Die Alone

by David Howarth

  The people of Tromsö knew nothing of the fight till the German ship got back there. Then they saw prisoners being landed, and men carried ashore on stretchers. Within a few hours, the story was whispered throughout the town, and some hundreds of citizens were in fear of their safety.

  Tromsö claims to be the biggest town in the Arctic, and it is the metropolis of an enormous area; but for all that, it is not very big: about the size of an average English market town. It is so far from other towns that it is more than usually self-contained. It would be an exaggeration to say that everyone knows everyone else; but certainly everyone knows its more prominent people. Its interests are fishing and whaling and arctic furs, and the general business of a small seaport. During the occupation, its modest and peaceful affairs were swamped by the demands of a German headquarters, and its society was riven by the chasms of political beliefs. It had its few traitors, despised and ostracised by everybody else; and it had a new form of society, in which money counted for very little, united by an implacable loathing of Germans which was never experienced in England or America.

  By the time that the Brattholm landed, the town had already organised itself to combat the effects of the occupation as well as it could. Active opposition had been out of the question without direct help from England; there were probably more Germans than Norwegians in north Norway. But some things could be done, and at least preparations could be made for the end of the occupation. Eight of the leading citizens had combined to build up an organisation to collect intelligence and make plans to administer the town and the surrounding country on the day of the Germans’ defeat. They expected this day from season to season throughout the five years; each Christmas they believed it would come in the spring, and each spring they looked forward to the autumn. They had sent messengers to Sweden and got into touch with the free Norwegian embassy in Stockholm, and through Stockholm with their government in London. They had been sent a radio transmitter and it was installed in the loft of the state hospital in the town.

  Apart from sending a radio message from time to time when the Germans did anything which seemed of particular interest, perhaps the most important thing which an organisation of this sort could do was to befriend people who got into serious trouble. Many men who would have opposed the Germans when they found they had a chance, or when a decision was forced upon them, had had to give in, in the early days, for fear of what would happen to their wives and children if they were arrested. It strengthened their will to resist if they knew there was somebody who would see that their families did not starve if they themselves were imprisoned or banished to Germany. The organisation in Tromsö had this matter extremely well arranged. It could call on funds from all the rich people and business houses in the town. The family of a man who suffered at the hands of the Germans was cared for without any question. When the crisis of the capture of Brattholm broke upon them, they were actually disbursing £2000 a week in secret to widows and orphans and the dependants of local men who had been arrested by the Germans or forced to flee the country.

  It was never intended that the sabotage organisation which the Brattholm party was to found should have any connection with this existing spontaneous intelligence and relief organisation. The two things were always kept separate in Norway, so that if one was broken open, the Germans could not necessarily penetrate the other. But the names of the two men in Tromsö which had been given to Eskeland and his party as their principal contacts were Thor Knudsen and Kaare Moursund. These men had been chosen, without their knowledge, merely because they were known to be patriotic; but they were actually two of the eight leaders of the Tromsö organisation.

  As soon as Jan heard from Einar in Bjorneskar that some of his companions were alive and in the Gestapo’s hands, he knew that Knudsen and Moursund ought to be warned. He could not possibly go into Tromsö himself without any papers, so he asked Einar if he would do it for him. Einar agreed; but whether he ever went there is not known. If he did, he would have been too late; because both men had already been arrested.

  These two arrests set Tromsö in a ferment of excitement and apprehension. Both the men were well-known in the town. Knudsen was the managing editor of one of the two local papers, and Moursund the office manager of the coastal shipping line. Knudsen was the actual man who distributed money for the organisation in secret charities. Several of his colleagues in the newspaper office were involved in his illegal activities, notably the editor, whose name is Sverre Larsen, and the owner, Larsen’s father, whom the Germans had already dismissed from his own paper for his views. The arrests were totally unexpected. No one believed that Knudsen or Moursund had known the Brattholm was coming, but it seemed only too clear that the Brattholm’s men had known these two names and were then, at that very moment, under Gestapo pressure. How many other names did they know? Would Knudsen and Moursund be put to torture? There was not a man in Tromsö that night with any pretentions to patriotism who did not know that his own hour might be at hand. Those who were closest to the two arrested men went home to prepare their own wives for a parting which it was useless to pretend would not be final, and to prepare themselves for the sudden imperious hammering on the door, and for the crippling pain which had to be borne in silence.

  Meanwhile, the shopkeeper and the official were called to town and courteously fêted by the Germans. Neither of these somewhat simple men was any match for the questioning at which the Gestapo were so remarkably skilful whether they used torture or threats or flattery. It is very unlikely that they hid anything which they knew, whether they wanted to or not. They were thanked by the Germans, and congratulated on their excellent work, and rewarded with money and food and cigarettes and two dozen bottles of brandy. It may be supposed that there in the town they first felt the depth of the wrath of their neighbours against them. The gifts of the Germans perhaps had a bitter taste.

  The next people to be arrested were, unexpectedly, the two fishermen who had promised to hide the cargo. Nobody ever discovered who had given their names to the Germans. The shopkeeper denied it. There is a possibility that the names were extracted from the crew, or that the two men were caught and questioned when they were rowing into Toftefjord, and gave themselves away. It was hard that these men were taken, because they did not even know that the cargo had come from England.

  The state of tension in Tromsö did not last very much longer. While it lasted, it was in all truth hardly bearable, and it could not have been sustained for very long. During the day after the first arrests, the men who had every reason to expect to be among the next to go went on with their business as usual, because to have done anything else would have focused suspicion on themselves. The newspaper had to be written and printed, to take a single example. But it was hardly possible for them to give the appearance of normal living, or to keep their thoughts or their eyes away from the shuttered windows of the great grey Gestapo building in the middle of the town, where they knew their own names might be shouted aloud when agony went at last beyond endurance.

  On the third day the news became known that the Brattholm men were dead and Knudsen and Moursund deported. It seems callous to say that the news of these deaths was heard with relief, and it is true that the thought of the barbarous deeds which had been done in their town shocked the townspeople profoundly; but the men themselves could only have wished that their end would come quickly.

  Exactly what was done with them did not become known till after the war was over, when their bodies were exhumed for Christian burial and their executioners were put on trial.

  Of the twelve men of the expedition, Jan had escaped, and one man had been killed in the fight in Toftefjord. The other ten were all brought to Tromsö alive, although several of them were wounded. Eight of them were shot chained together on the outskirts of the town, and thrown into a common grave. The other two were tortured to the point of death and then put in the Catholic hospital, where they died.

  The details of these executions are known,
but they are not a thing to be written or read about. Two men were selected for torture in the hope that they would talk; but the shooting of the other eight was accompanied by acts of ferocity which were absolutely aimless. Countries which are civilised and yet have recourse to execution have evolved the convention of the firing-squad and the one or two blank rounds. This protects the conscience of people whose duty compels them to act as executioners. The method the Germans used in Tromsö was the very opposite of this. Yet it was done in strictest secrecy. There was no question of making use of cruelty as a deterrent to other people. It can only have been done as it was for one possible reason: to amuse the executioners. The Germans made it an orgy of hideous delight.

  It is not known whether one of the men who were tortured gave Knudsen’s and Moursund’s names to the torturers. It would not be surprising if they did, and no one would have the right to blame them. But it is equally possible that the activities of these two men were already known to the Germans, and that they were arrested on mere suspicion of complicity in the Brattholm affair. Both of them died in concentration camps in Germany, and so did the two fishermen Andreasson and Kristiansen.

  So when the shopkeeper played for safety, and the official did what he afterwards claimed was his duty, their actions cost fifteen lives. Yet it is not for an Englishman, who has never lived under the rule of the Germans, to pass judgment on what they did. Their own countrymen judged them hardly. In a few moments of panic, they both threw away their peace of mind for ever. For the rest of the war, their lives were made a misery by their neighbours, and after it ended, the shopkeeper was sentenced by a Norwegian court to eight years’ hard labour, and the official to fourteen.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE AVALANCHE

  WHEN EINAR left Jan in the kitchen at Bjorneskar and went to fetch his father, Bernhard Sörensen, the old man was in bed. Einar called to him from the bottom of the stairs, and when he woke up and asked what the matter was, he said, “Come out, Father. I want to talk to you.” He was not sure if he ought to tell his mother.

  Bernhard, who was 72 at that time, came down and listened to Einar’s story, leaving his wife upstairs. When he had heard it all, he went back to his bedroom and began to put on his clothes. Fru Sörensen asked him where he was going.

  “We’ve got to take the boat out,” the old man said. “There’s a man who wants to cross the sound.”

  “But now, at this time of night?” she asked him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It’s a terrible night.”

  “So much the better. We’ll go down to Glomma and cross with the wind. Now, don’t worry. He must get across, you see. It’s one of those things we mustn’t talk about.”

  When he was ready he left her, with no more reassurance than that, to the traditional role of women in a war. She spent an anxious night at home, waiting for Bernhard, to whom she had then been married for fifty years.

  But he was enjoying himself. Jan had been worried at asking a man of his age to cross the sound on such a night of wind and snow. It was a row of ten miles across and back. But Bernhard laughed at his fears. When he was a young man, he had rowed to the Lofoten fishing and back every year, and that was two hundred miles. He did not think much of the rising generation. “In my day,” he used to say, “it was wooden ships and iron men, and what is it now? Iron ships and a lot of wooden men. Why, do you know,” he said, as they went down to the boathouse at the water’s edge, “do you know, there was a young fellow taken to hospital sick only the other day. And do you know why he was sick? Because he’d got his feet wet. Yes,” he chuckled, “taken to hospital because he’d got his feet wet. I’ve had my feet wet for over seventy years. Come along, boy. Across the sound is nothing. We’ll swindle the devils out of one corpse, eh?”

  The old man’s good humour was catching, and Jan himself was elated at the prospect of reaching the mainland. The news of the fate of his friends had not shocked him very deeply in itself. Like everyone who took part in that kind of operation, they had all left England with a small expectation of life, and death loses its power to hurt when it is half-expected. Besides, he had thought of them as dead ever since he had seen them lying on the beach in Toftefjord. It distressed him more to learn they were captured alive and had lived for another three days, because for their own sakes and from every point of view it would have been better if they had been killed in action.

  But apart from the matter of emotion, the story had a minor lesson to teach him. Hitler himself had just issued an order that everyone who took any part in this kind of guerrilla action was to be shot, whether he was in uniform or not. They had all known this before they left England; but if the order was meant to be a deterrent, it was accepted as a compliment. So far as Jan knew, this was the first time since the order was made that a crew had been captured, and he still had a half-formed belief that a uniform might give some protection. He was still dressed as a sailor himself; but now it seemed rather absurd, on the face of it, to try to cross Norway in such a conspicuous rig. But to change it was easier thought of than done. It had been simple enough to swap underclothes with the Pedersen family, but it was different to ask someone to give him a whole civilian outfit when he had nothing to give in exchange and no money to offer. But anyhow, when he came to think of it carefully, it could not make very much difference. The Germans knew he was still at large, and he could never pass himself off as a local civilian without his civilian papers. If he kept out of sight of the Germans, his unform did not matter, and if he came to close quarters with them, he would have to fight it out whatever clothes he was wearing. In the middle distance, the uniform might be a disadvantage; but on the other hand, he thought to himself, it was warm.

  But at the particular moment when they got into the boat and took up the oars, the naval uniform was an embarrassment, because Einar and Bernhard took it for granted that he was a naval rating, and he felt that he ought to offer to row. He had rowed before, but only on lakes when he was trout fishing; and when he tried one of the heavy sweeps in the high sea which was running off Bjorneskar, all he managed to do was to knock the tops off the waves and splash the old man who was sitting astern. He had to make the lame excuse that he was too tired, and Bernhard took over, probably not surprised to find that the navy was not what it had been.

  Bernhard referred to the Germans as devils. Devil is one of the few serious swear words in the Norwegian language, but he used it with a lack of emphasis that made it rather engaging. It was as if he could not bring himself to utter the word German. “You see the point of land over there?” he would say to Jan. “That’s Finkroken. There are seventy devils there. They’ve some damned great cannons, and searchlights. We’ll give them a wide berth. And down there ahead of us, that’s Sjursnes. That’s where the patrol boats lie. A whole company of devils there too. But don’t you worry. They won’t get you this time, boy. We’ll swindle them. We’ll steer between them.” And he chuckled with joy, and heaved on his massive oar.

  Jan was more than content to leave it to Einar and Bernhard to get him across the sound. This was the second consecutive night he had been without sleep, and he had been on the go all the time. He was too tired to take any notice of the flurries of snow and spindrift, or the steep seas which bore down on them out of the darkness to starboard, or of the searchlights which endlessly swept the sound and sometimes appeared as a dazzling eye of light with a halo round it when a beam passed over them. Einar and his father were sure they would not be seen, so long as the snow went on falling, and they were not bothered about the patrol boats, although they were crossing their beats. “No devils at sea on a night like this,” the old man said. “There’s not a seaman among them.”

  Jan did not care. The mainland was close ahead, and Einar had given him the things which he coveted most in the world just then: a pair of ski-boots and skis. In an hour or so, he would finish with boats and the sea, and enter a medium where he would feel at home. Among the snow mountains on ski
s he would be confident of outdistancing any German. He could go where he wished and depend upon no one. Even the Swedish frontier was only sixty miles away: two days’ journey, if all went well; and the Germans had lost his trail. He needed one good sleep, he thought, and then he would be his own master.

  It was about three in the morning when Bernhard and Einar beached the boat on the southern shore. Jan jumped out thankfully. The others could not afford to wait. To take advantage of the wind on the way back home, they would have to row close under the devils’ gun battery at Finkroken. They thought they could bluff it out if they were seen, so long as they were not too far away from home, but it would be better not to have to try. So as soon as Jan was ashore with his skis, they wished him luck and pushed off and disappeared: two more to add to this list of chance acquaintances to whom he owed his life.

  There were small farms along the water’s edge just there, with houses spaced out at intervals of two hundred yards or so. The people who owned them pastured sheep and cattle on the narrow strip of fertile land between the sea and the mountainside, and eked out a living by fishing. The Sörensens knew everyone who lived there, and had said he could go safely to any of the houses. They had specially mentioned a man called Lockertsen. He lived in a farm called Snarby, which was a little larger than the rest, and he had a thirty-foot motor-boat which might come in useful.

  Jan would gladly have set off there and then without making further contacts. He felt guilty already at the number of people he had involved in his own predicament; and besides, this series of short encounters, each at a high pitch of excitement and emotion, was exhausting in itself. He longed to be able to sleep in barns without telling anyone, and take to the hills again each morning. But before he was fit to embark on a life like that, he had to have one long sleep whatever it cost him, and that night he could only count on a few hours more before the farms were stirring. He reluctantly put his skis on his shoulder and went up through a steep farmyard to the house which was nearest. He crept quietly round the house till he found the door, and he tried the handle. It opened. As it happened, this was Snarby.