The Ice Museum (26 page)

 
 
The German troops had sat up in the north, waiting to fight the Russians, oppressed by the cold. ‘The Arctic is nothing,' they were told by their commanders, but the winter storms chased across the sea and the nights were long and bleak. The Germans and Russians fought across the border for the port of Murmansk. Thousands died on both sides, as the struggle of the summer of 1941 dragged into the winter. Even when spring came, the troops were lost in snow blizzards, scrambling across ice-hard rivers, their guns frozen. The campaigns were stalled by the frozen season.

The occupation had violently altered the view; along the shore of the northern coast, in every town I came to, the story was the same. In October 1944, after intense fighting, Russian troops entered Norway. The order came to the German forces from Hitler that a scorched earth tactic should be used, without compassion for the inhabitants. They were to be removed by force, as necessary. As the Russians advanced across the border, the Germans burned every home, and retreated to the west. The German troops chased backwards from the Russian border towards Tromsø, hounding the inhabitants of the towns and villages into overcrowded refugee ships. The dead zone encompassed an area larger than Denmark; sometimes all that remained of a vibrant fishing town was its church, spared through piety or superstition, standing on an empty coast. Most of the inhabitants lost everything; sometimes they buried their valuables, their family heirlooms, hoping to save them. In one of the museums along the coast, I had seen two plush and silk armchairs, which were found buried in the ground and never reclaimed by their owners. They remained in the museum, remnants of a vanished town.

Along the coast, I had seen the displays of grainy black-and-white postcards of towns torched by the retreating Germans, before and after shots, grim in their contrasts. In Bodø Museum I bought a postcard of the harbour, from 1897, a shot of a crowd gathering on a short pier made of wood, staring out to sea at a steamer. A great cloud of thick white smoke gushes up from the ship's chimney. A faded reminder of the northern towns as they had been, as Nansen passed them in
Fram
, as the Germans first found them: quiet, isolated settlements, clusters of wooden houses, a solitary church rising above the sloped roofs. The inhabitants of the western villages saw the smoke clouds in the distance and heard the Germans approaching.

After the burning, nothing remained except shadows of ash, lying where buildings once stood, and the outlines of roads. Beyond, the rock islands in the harbours loomed large above the dust. After the end of the war, rows of ready-made houses were brought over from Sweden, hammered up in a week. New wooden rows were planted on the blackened soil, sparsely furnished and hurriedly decorated. Later the towns took to concrete—concrete bunkers, a line of concrete shops, a concrete library, sometimes a concrete church.

Kirkenes had been burnt, transformed in a day into rows of piled-up ash and debris, the mountains scarred by soot. At Kirkenes, by the Russian border, the boat stopped for the last time. The wind blasted through the concrete town square and Russian trawlers sat in the harbour. The sounds of Finnish and Russian mingled with the long vowels of the Norwegians. In Kirkenes the day dawned into a white brilliance, and the sea glinted under the glare. The streets were full of teenagers in trainers, and the older inhabitants were sitting in the sunshine, though the wind was cold. Kirkenes was a place of multi-coloured wooden houses backed by green hills lined with silver birch trees, stark against the pallid horizon. An iron ore mine stood near the road out of town, the machinery left to rust. The silver Pasvik River flowed to the Barents Sea.

As the wind bent the trees, I took a bus to the border, which ran through streets of large wooden houses, post-war constructions, and past frozen lakes, and across a bridge. It was another bizarre ride for tourists, in the anti-Disneyland of the north, where the main attraction was the vastness of the mountains. If you missed a trip, to a frozen escarpment or to an empty glacier, you could come round again; the monumental rocks never changed. There were even bedraggled tourists here, looking jaded and cold, clutching their cameras like amulets against disaster. They were quiet on the bus, as if they had hoped for something else, but they resolutely lifted their cameras to the view, to the signs in Russian and Norwegian, to the silver river. The road began in Kirkenes and ran to the Russian town of Murmansk, through the empty border-lands.

But we stopped at the border, at a white gate flanked by stone pillars, where soldiers sat in huts, guns on their laps, their faces obscured. A kiosk sold Russian dolls and ice cream. For a few minutes everyone stood uncertainly, leafing through the postcards, looking at the Russian and Norwegian flags, dancing side by side as the wind tugged at their ropes. Then the bus turned around again.

Later, I sat in a modest wooden house, on one of the homogeneous streets of wooden houses in Kirkenes, which ended in a small park. I was drinking coffee with a middle-aged Norwegian woman. Her house was mostly pink, the walls were pink, and the frills on the cushions; the shelves were covered with ugly china, the sorts of ornaments that appeared at village fête stalls and would be packed into boxes at the end of the day again, unbought. But she had bought in bulk.

She was Gunvor, and she was wearing pink, with her grey-blond hair scraped into a bun. She had a firm handshake, but she had welcomed me with a veiled expression. I understood why. Gunvor was the leftover debris of World War Two, the leftover debris of the Aryan obsession, Quisling's regeneration of the Nordic race, Himmler's blond-lust. Gunvor was called a
krigsbarn
by her countrypeople, a war child. She had been called worse; she was called names throughout her childhood—half-breed, misfit, outsider—and her mother was sometimes called a German whore. There were thousands of children like Gunvor, maybe as many as ten thousand in Norway, and thousands in other occupied countries, but this still didn't make the Norwegian authorities inclined to favour them after the war.

During the war, Himmler's
Lebensborn
homes were established in Norway, and Hitler issued an order for ‘the advancement of racially valuable German inheritance' by supplying care and provision for the children of German soldiers born to Norwegian and Dutch women. SS men could sleep with local women, without the fear of having to provide for the child: if the union resulted in a pregnancy, then the services of the
Lebensborn
homes were available, or the child could be taken back to Germany and supplied with foster parents. Some said these homes were breeding centres; neighbours imagined rooms of ‘Aryan' seductresses, waiting for their next soldier. More likely, they were kept in line with Nazi faux-morality, overseeing the births of ‘Aryan' children.

Gunvor was born, she told me, in December 1943. Her Norwegian mother had been working as a waitress in the army barracks where the German soldiers lived. Her father was an officer; that was all Gunvor knew. Her mother, she thought, had entered a
Lebensborn
home and had given birth to Gunvor. But a year after she was born, her father had left Norway.

‘I never knew him. My mother never spoke about him, except once, and briefly. She married shortly after the war ended, to a man who didn't mind me. He died when I was ten. They had two other children, who never liked me very much because I was so unpopular at school.' She tried to laugh. ‘You know how children are, when someone is called names, they don't want to be their friend. But we made things up years later. My mother and my stepfather are now dead. I never tried to trace my father, probably now he is dead too,' Gunvor said. ‘Even my generation is now old.' She paused, and she motioned towards a plate of dry Norwegian cakes and a pot of coffee.

‘Some of the
krigsbarn
did try to trace their fathers,' she said. ‘I heard such stories later, I was glad in a way that I never knew mine. Friends of mine, people I have met through the
krigsbarn
networks and societies, told me that they went to find their fathers in Germany, and when they tracked them down, their fathers were so horrified to see them. By then, they had wives, they had other children; they didn't want to remember. There was one woman, she is an amazing woman, she went to Germany and her father knew all about her, but he told her to go away; he said that he wanted nothing to do with her. She was so angry, and she had all the proof, from her mother, so she took him to court. He was old and weak, and in the end he tried to stop the court proceedings; he was embarrassed, most probably, and he offered her money, he tried to apologize to her. By then she didn't care. She proved in court that he was her father, and then she left Germany and never spoke to him again.'

It sounded like a hollow victory, but Gunvor was consoled by it.

‘Mostly people don't want to remember us,' Gunvor said. ‘There were many people after the war who wanted us sent out of Norway, to Germany, where they said we belonged or to Australia, just to get rid of us. We were a horrible memory of all the compromises people made with the Germans, of the ways people made such mistakes during the war.'

Gunvor's face creased when she spoke, and her fingers moved nervously on her coffee cup. I had found her through a
krigsbarn
support group. She had responded politely to my call. But still, she hardly enjoyed talking about the past. The past had made her shy and suspicious. Gunvor's house was immaculately pink, cluttered with ornaments, but there were absences. There were no family photographs on her mantelpiece. Her curtains were drawn, though it was mid-afternoon.

‘I was wondering,' I said, ‘if you wished you had found your father. '

‘It's better this way,' she said. ‘For years I was very unhappy about it, not knowing him, I longed just to know a little about him. But whenever I said something to my mother, her face just closed up, she wouldn't speak. And now, I think I am glad. This way, I can imagine my father was a reluctant soldier, that he never believed in the aims of the Nazis. I can imagine he was a nice man, a kind man. My mother never said so, and he never took any interest in her. He must have known there was a child, but I don't know for certain.'

She was wilfully incurious, trusting to her imagined reality, her consolatory reconstruction of events. It was hardly surprising; the
krigsbarn
had a terrible time after the war. In the Aryan Empire they had been the ideal racial group; under Himmler's schemes the children of the
Lebensborn
programme in Norway were central to the project of the Third Reich. But after the defeat of Germany, the ideal progeny of the Aryan Empire suffered an immediate change in status. In post-war Norway, a virulent Germanophobia spread, and the
krigsbarn
and their mothers supplied an uncomfortable reminder of a period the Norwegians hoped to forget.

‘Thousands of the mothers were put in prison, and their children were taken away,' said Gunvor. ‘In Norway the top psychiatrists, such as the head of the largest mental hospital, said that the mothers had been insane, mentally defective, because they had slept with the Germans. So the
krigsbarn
were thought of as insane too; they were thought to be mentally ill because of their background. So they were treated like lunatics.'

Spurious medical conclusions, founded on notions of genetic taint, led to decades of maltreatment and neglect. The
krigsbarn
stayed in Norway, but many of them were shunned, hidden in children's homes, or shut away in mental institutions.

‘There were
Lebensborn
children in Germany, Holland, France, in the Channel Islands, in Belgium, Denmark, as well as in Norway. We have networks,' said Gunvor, sadly. ‘We think the Norwegian authorities concealed the abuse, or turned away. They didn't care.'

‘What would you like to happen?' I asked. ‘What would make things better?'

‘For many people, it is too late. Their lives have already been ruined. There have been cases fought, for compensation, against the Norwegian authorities. We feel that a lot of people were deprived of an education and therefore could not work to gain money. So really they lost potential earnings, because of this abuse, aside from all the other terrible things that happened that you can't put a price on. But even if we got compensation, well, I don't care. It wouldn't help me. You see my house'—and she cast a careless hand at her pink room—‘I am not poor. It is something else that I feel I lost.'

Gunvor rarely paused; she spilled out the story, trying to race through it, so she could return to the soft pinkness of her room, the flowers in the vase, the china ornaments cluttering the shelves. On the street outside, I imagined, people were walking dogs, cycling along the quiet streets, children were tumbling around in the park. But Gunvor's curtains were drawn. She could only hear the muffled sounds of the afternoon, the faint voices and footsteps moving past her door.

‘I was never put away,' said Gunvor, ‘because my mother was so determined to keep me. She was unusual. We lived a poor life together, even after she married. I don't know . . .' She paused, and wiped her brow. She was clearly uncomfortable, even now, even talking about the events of fifty years ago, even with her network of
krigsbarn
around her. ‘I don't know. Perhaps if she hadn't married, then things would have been much worse. She might have been bullied more; I might have been taken away. Certainly no one wanted to be her friend, for years, and my stepfather was brave to marry her. He really truly loved her. He saw she had been young, she had made a terrible mistake. There were young girls, hopelessly ignorant, who thought the German soldiers were dashing in their uniforms. I don't understand.'

She was fumbling in a drawer, and she produced a black-and-white photograph and pushed it towards me.