My wife was born in Norway. I was born in England. We are an ordinary couple with four children and eleven grandchildren. We have lived together in Norway since 1962. Before that we both spent several years in the USA where we met, decided to marry and left for Norway.

I was four years old when the war broke out in 1939. I remember my father coming home from a place called Dunkirk and later, learning that he had lost an eye while training for further duty. At school we sang songs about Hitler’s and Goebbels’ physical deficiencies. Posters about walls having ears, ration cards for buying sweets, blanked-out road signs, sirens and hours in the cellar made their impressions but I could hardly call these experiences close contact with the war. As I grew up, the war as history became one of my interests. I read Chester Wilmot’s acclaimed book ‘Struggle for Europe’ and Winston Churchill’s six-volume ‘The Second World War’. Nobody else in my circle of friends and family seemed too interested – the war was a bad memory, to be forgotten as quickly as possible.

My wife Else spent the war years in Oslo. She remembers the exodus from Oslo to the supposed security of the countryside north of the city. She remembers the night the Germans came, the turmoil they caused to the school system, the night the saboteurs destroyed a huge chunk of the harbour – and she remembers the day the Royal Family came back to a tumultuous reception in Oslo.

When I came to Norway in 1960 it seemed that people were still thinking actively about the war. The words Resistance, Gestapo, Blücher, Quisling, Narvik and Telemark took on a new meaning. The German occupation of Norway, of which I knew almost nothing, was still an almost palpable part of Norway’s daily life. I heard of and met some of the big names in the resistance movement. I knew, and knew of, some of those who had been on the wrong side, supporters of Quisling. Later I read books by some of the ‘heroes’ and began to wonder about all the men and women who didn’t become heroes, but who, nevertheless, had never capitulated and had contributed in their own way to achieve victory.

It turned out that in my wife’s family there is such a man. He is not a close relative, we did not meet very often but he had had an exciting experience during the war – and he wanted us to write his story for the Internet. Then, recently, almost by accident, we met a woman who had spent time in the notorious Nazi prison outside Oslo during the war. These two stories were the inspiration for us to try and collect further examples – especially when both subjects regretted that they had not related their experiences in detail to their children or grandchildren.
The generations we are writing for.

We are late in starting this project and we now rely on people letting us know of ‘Unsung Heroes’ in their families or among their friends.

Geoff Ward
Asker 2005