It’s been 83 years since Norway’s small Jewish population was rounded up during World War II and shipped to concentration camps in Germany on November 26, 1942. With war in Europe again, calls have resumed for Norwegians to “never forget how wrong things can go.” 

This photo remains the only documented image from the largest deportation, on the German ship Donau, of Norwegian citizens who were Jewish. PHOTO: NDLA/Georg W Fossum/Aftenposten NTB Scanpix

Those were the words of Lill Fanny Sæther, among those writing commentaries in Norwegian media this week about Wednesday’s dubious anniversary. Her mother was among those who managed to flee over the border to Sweden just before Norwegian police carried out orders from Norwegian officials during the Nazi German occupation of Norway.

“We must remember the development from harassment, to hatred, to genocide and holocaust,” Sæther wrote in newspaper Dagsavisen on Tuesday. She warned how the targets of all that spread to hundreds of thousands of Romany, homosexuals and the physically impaired: “It was state-run, industrial murder.”

Sæther has written a book about how her “well-informed” mother, a British citizen living in Norway, survived the holocaust after fleeing the family’s home on Ullevålsveien in Oslo with her sister and her own mother. She managed to also get her father out of the nearby Ullevål Hospital in the middle of the night and they all hid in a truck that drove them to the border to Sweden, which remained neutral during World War II.

“But I didn’t manage to save the two youngest,” Sæther’s mother often said when referring to her youngest siblings who would have been Sæther’s own aunt and uncle if they had survived. Instead, she told Sæther years later, they were among those put on board the German ship Donau, tied up in Oslo harbour and ready to sail under terrible conditions for those on board. They were killed in the gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp on December 1, 1942. Another younger brother had already been arrested and jailed at Oslo’s Bredtvet Prison.

Sæther stressed how prejudice and conspiracy theories about Jewish Norwegians and many others had spread in the years leading up to World War II. She notes that the Nasjonal samling (NS) party led by executed traitor Vidkun Quisling had 43,000 members in 1943. “Far too many were indifferent and turned their back on that,” she wrote, while others made a “heroic effort” at their own risk for trying to save those persecuted in Norway. “Their efforts can’t be forgotten either,” she wrote.

Many others were also issuing new warnings in Norway this week, about how conspiracy theories, prejudice, anti-Semitism, racism and fascism are rising again around the world. Right-wing extremists have been winning political power in the US and around Europe. Norway’s most right-wing party in Parliament, the Progress Party, currently ranks as the country’s largest in recent public opinion polls but is a big supporter of Israel and insists its anti-immigration policies are not racially motivated.

A total of 772 Jewish Norweigians were sent to German concentration camps, including the 529 Jewish on board the Donau on November 26, 1942. Only 37 survived and returned to Norway, to find their homes and belongings taken over by others in their absence. The state didn’t apologize until long afterwards, including reparations that funded the Holocaust Center in Oslo.

A total of  66 Romany in Norway were also deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and killed there as well. King Harald V official unveiled a new memorial to their suffering last week on the fjordside of Oslo’s central train station, where all their names are now carved in stone. He was accompanied by the president of the Norwegian Parliament, government ministers and the head of Oslo’s city government.

‘Day of shame’
Lars West Johansen, editor and commentator in newspaper Dagsavisen, called November 26 “a day of shame” for Norway that must not be forgotten. “It’s a date  of tragedy and hopelessness, disappointment and accusations,” he wrote, but it can be used “to see some light” at a time of darkness. Surveys show that anti-Semitism is not widespread in Norway, he wrote, but it’s rising. “Legitimate criticism of Israel” over its destruction in Gaza, he noted, can also be seen as criticism of Jews.

Newspaper Aftenposten published a story earlier this week about a young girl who escaped deportation with her family. Gerd Philipson Golombek, now age 95, recalls how Norway’s state police at the time had appeared at the door of their apartment in Oslo’s Grünerløkka district early in the morning and ordered the family to pack food and clothing before they would be driven to the pier where Donau was docked. Jewish men had been taken into custody a month earlier, now it was the women, children and elderly who were rounded up.

By the time they got to the pier, however, the ship’s gangway had been hoisted. They were too late, and the taxi took them back home, literally saving all their lives. The family later managed to flee to Sweden and lived there until the war ended in 1945.

“I have put it behind me and had a good life,” Golombek told Aftenposten. “I have a son and a daughter who have done well, I also have four grandchildren. I must be a very strong woman.”

NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund