I dag fyller onkel Knut 97 år. Han är den enda från min farfar Kristians syskonskara som är i livet.
Knut, som fortfarande är klar i skallen, stark och frisk, firar motvilligt sin dag med att, på grund av sin ålder, få körkortet tillbakadraget. Hans enda bekymmer är hörseln. När jag ringde och grattade honom tidigare i dag tog han mig för att vara killen som ska köra dem till Norway Hall utanför Seattle, där han senare skulle uppvaktas.
Han är en fantastisk människa med en imponerande historia. Jag är stolt över att ha honom i min släkt, och glad att jag fick chansen att komma honom nära när jag under en period bodde hemma hos honom, och hans tillika fantastiska fru Haldis, i Seattle 1994 – dit de emigrerade 1948. (Han pratar för övrigt än i dag engelska med kraftig norsk brytning.)
Nedan återpublicerar jag en artikel skriven om honom och hans flykt undan nazisterna under andra världskriget. Läs den!
Heroes in Our Backyard
“In the riveting full-length feature film, The Perfect Storm, a swordfisherman is snagged by a hook and catapulted over the side of a boat into the North Atlantic Ocean. This harrowing movie — based on real-life characters — reminded free-lance journalist and movie critic, C.E. Chambers, of another drama. Its principal characters, however, survived to tell their epic story. Knut and Haldis Einarsen are long-time Seattle residents whose life-and-death adventures take place against the forbidding backdrops of the Bering Sea and Nazi-occupied Norway.”
Knut Andreas Einarsen proudly standing on the Norwegian battleship Norge in 1935. The ship was sunk by the Germans during their invasion of Norway in April 1940. (Photo belongs to Knut and Haldis Einarsen.)
“Don’t mess with Knut Einarsen. At 85-years-old, his well-muscled arms and chest put longtime weight lifters to shame, and his daily activities rival the average teenager’s. He’s a former halibut fisherman and proud Norwegian-American who resides in Seattle. A combination of rugged, land-of-the-midnight-sun upbringing and death-defying work environments.
In the early ‘60s, Knut was fishing in the Bering Sea (located between Alaska and Russia) when a hook-leader suddenly swung out-of-control and whipped a razor-sharp, four-inch halibut hook into his nose. Similar to a scene from the gripping, real-life film, The Perfect Storm, the wench wasn’t stopped and the incoming fishing line pulled the 5’8”, 165-pound dynamo toward the railing. Luckily for Knut, the rotten leader, which was made out of twine, broke. The gargantuan hook, though, was still caught in the right side of his nose.
The crew, at first unaware of the incident, now stood open-mouthed. There were seven of them, all seasoned fishermen of Norwegian descent. They were six hours from the closest shore, but it was too risky to head back without removing the germ-infested hook first, and, besides, there was a full catch of halibut to take care of. An additional dilemma: there was no wire-cutter on board.
Knut, a former resistance fighter during the Nazi occupation of Norway, did what he had to do: He reached inside his right nostril to the lethally barbed hook and slowly pulled it down toward the end of his nose. He kept pulling it down and around, working the arced portion through — then yanked as hard as he could to force the square-shaped eye through his outer nose and down his nostril.
The cook, who was watching, confessed later that he almost fainted.
The intrepid fisherman then mixed iodine with Lysol and sterilized the gaping hole in his nose with toothpicks soaked in the antiseptic. Fifteen minutes later, he returned to the rigors of commercial fishing for another ten hours.
Knut Einarsen retired from halibut fishing in 1985. His days are now filled with volunteer work and social activities at various Norwegian organizations, entertaining, traveling, and overseeing his house and extensive property. Wrestling with and cleaning huge halibut during 20-hour work-days was a fraught-filled occupation, but it had provided a good living for a former refugee -– someone who had escaped on foot in the dead of winter to Sweden.
On April 9, 1940, Hitler’s forces invaded Norway. Knut, 26-years-old, born and raised in the northwestern community of Skarstad, had recently been called back into the Norwegian Navy. He was on leave in Narvik, a hub of Swedish-exported ore, fifty miles southeast of his hometown.
The Vandringen in 1937. (Photo belongs to Knut and Haldis Einarsen)
He was asleep in his family-owned freighter, the Vandringen (The Wanderer), when the sound of shouting and gunfire roused him. It was 4:00 a.m.
“Some of those darn Nazis were hiding in a German whaling ship in the Narvik Harbor,” he complains, as indignant as if it had happened yesterday.
It was the largest sea-borne operation in history: A German armada –- 42 war-ships and 65 other German vessels -– had attacked Norway’s main seaports all at once. The Norwegian government, which had been determined to preserve neutrality during the escalating World War II, was now a fly thrashing about in Germany’s web.
Knut and his crew abandoned the ship to flee by crowded bus to Ballangen — Knut and one other passenger, holding hands, perched precariously on the outside fenders — and then by boat to the fjord-bound Skarstad.
Knut and three of his brothers working on the Vandringen before the German occupation of Norway: Kristian (far right – my grandfather/min farfar), Maurelius (second from the right), Knut (third from the right), Egil (far left). The photo is the property of Knut and Haldis Einarsen.
Within a few weeks, the German occupiers gave the Einarsen family permission to continue transporting cement up and down the Norwegian coast with the Vandringen. However, Knut, the youngest of nine siblings, joined other family members and friends in working behind the scenes to undermine the invaders. His older brother, Marelius, a member of the secret Norwegian resistance army, was killed while assisting British allies in northern Norway during the first two weeks of the occupation. A large monument dedicated to his memory overlooks the small fishing community of Skarstad.
Knut Einarsen standing next to the monument erected in Skarstad in the memory of his brother, Marelius, who was shot and killed by the Germans during the first two weeks of their invasion of Norway. (Photo belongs to Knut and Haldis Einarsen)
On June 10, two months after the invasion, Norway officially surrendered to Germany.
The green-uniformed, goose-stepping Nazis (who had installed a Norwegian traitor as premier after King Haakon VII and his cabinet fled to London) began enforcing draconian measures to subdue resistance efforts. Possession of radios, as well as firearms, was now punishable by death. It wasn’t difficult to locate the offenders: radio owners incur an annual tax in socialistic Norway. The disheartened Scandinavians, who knew they would be imprisoned if they were overheard complaining about the German occupiers, trekked to their local law enforcement headquarters with their receivers.
Knut owned two radios, one for the house and one for the Vandringen – but there was no way he was going to let the Nazis have both. He fashioned identical boxes from wood, put a radio inside one of them and a wooden block of similar weight in the other. The Norwegian sheriff, who never opened the boxes, gave him receipts for both.
Knut hid the forbidden radio in a shack one mile from his parents’ Skarstad home. His oldest brother, Egil, listened in one night to the war news and made the mistake of telling his wife, Anna. She was earning good money by washing the German soldiers’ clothes and betrayed Knut to a high-ranking enemy officer stationed at a submarine listening station.
“Go home and take care of your own family!” he inexplicably retorted.
The defiant Knut had also refused to give up his rifle. He was in the barn one day, oiling it heavily before hiding it under a bridge, when Endre, Anna’s seven-year-old son, unexpectedly walked in. Knut grabbed him by his shirt, lifted him off the ground and shook him.
“If you tell your mother, I’ll knock you in the head!” he warned, sky-blue eyes glaring and sinewy arms bulging under his shirt.
Endre, now in his 60s, still lives in northern Norway. During family reunions he and Knut reminisce about the war-torn years. They both chuckle when Endre reminds him that he never told his mother about the hidden rifle because “Jeg var så redd.” (“I was so scared.”)
Knut wasn’t the only Norseman who resisted giving up his rifle. One day in 1942, he and Haldis, a blond-haired, rosy-cheeked Kjøpsvik girl from a fjord directly south of Skarstad, were picking lingonberries in the Kjøpsvik woods. They froze in their tracks when they crossed paths with their Lutheran minister, Kolbjørn Varmann. He had a rifle nonchalantly slung over his shoulder.
“Do you dare to do this?” Knut sputtered, not sure if Varmann was hunting game to supplement the near-starvation food rations or Nazis.
“Den som ingenting våger, ingenting vinner,” he responded. (“Those who don’t take chances, don’t win anything.”)
Kolbjørn Varmann, who had married Knut and Haldis Rist a few months earlier, had fought in the resistance army in the mountains around Narvik before Norway officially surrendered. He openly spoke against “den forbannende Hitler” (“that damned Hitler”) — even while preaching in the pulpit -– but collaborated secretly with Haldis’s father, a member of the underground, to transport Jews and other targets of Nazi wrath to the safety of Sweden.
1. Knut and Haldis on their wedding day August 16, 1941. 2. Knut and Haldis Einarsen celebrating their 50th anniversary in 1991. They celebrated their 70th anniversary earlier this year. (Photos belongs to Knut and Haldis Einarsen)
The irascible Norwegian minister repeatedly ripped the propaganda-filled Nazi banners from his church’s walls and publicly denounced the three German sympathizers who attended his church. German soldiers arrived after one church service to arrest him but he had disappeared. A doctor had hidden him in a coffin. He survived and later became a highly respected member of the Norwegian Parliament. (See Wikipedia.)
Knut and Haldis, meanwhile, were living under a death sentence of their own. It was early 1943 when the Nazis stationed in Narvik informed Knut that they were confiscating the well-built, 67-foot Vandringen for their personal mail route. Knut, however remembered his brother, Marelius, who had been killed by the Germans -– and lied to the Nazis about its condition.
“The bow is full of dry rot,” he said, fearlessly matching their hardened, hawk-like eyes with his own stony expression.
A shipyard supervisor in Narvik, a friend of the Einarsen family, filed a false report stating that the Vandringen was in need of repair. The Nazis gave Knut one month to make the ship serviceable.
Just a few days later, however, on a blistery, snow-filled Saturday in March, a Nazi officer telephoned Knut and ordered him to report to Narvik the next Monday. An unknown German sympathizer had betrayed him. Knut, who was cutting grass at his mother’s house in Skarstad, used a pay-phone to warn Haldis, who was in Kjøpsvik. He didn’t want to take any chances in case his parents’ phone was tapped.
“I’m going to pick you up; have your skis with you,” was his terse message.
A few hours later, the very sea-worthy Vandringen sailed into the Kjøpsvik fjord and Haldis climbed on. Knut piloted it back to Skarstad where they were to rendezvous with a man from the Norwegian underground who had agreed to guide them over the mountains into Sweden. They were shocked to learn that the Nazis had arrested him.
Knut and Haldis were beginning to panic. Fortuitously, one of Knut’s cousins, the captain of the cement freighter, Nordstjernen (Northstar), happened to be in Skarstad at the time and agreed to help them. Twenty-four people, including the Einarsens and two crew members from the Vandringen, were soon hidden on board. During the wee hours of that Sunday morning, the Nordstjernen’s brave pilot navigated without lights through the long, hazardous Tysfjord, desperately avoiding the Nazi patrols that regularly circuited an island in the fjord. Six hours later, the fugitives were dropped off on the shore of a steep mountain.
Wearing white sheets over their woolen clothes, they carved icy steps on the side of the treacherous mountain as they climbed up, carrying skis, extra clothes, food (buttered bread and coffee in insulated containers), five rifles and 800 rounds of ammunition. Four hours later they reached the summit. They were not able to make good speed by skiing -– but frequently had to throw themselves facedown on the frozen tundra when German surveillance planes flew close by.
Using a stolen, detailed German map of the area, they skied, walked -– and tried to suck on the now-frozen bread -– for the next 36 hours. Clothes, rifles and ammunition -– everything but their skis and the clothes on their backs -– were discarded as the exhausting journey began to take its toll. Haldis, who had begun to hallucinate about her church in Kjøpsvik, sat down on the hard snow and refused to continue.
“Vi har til go over den neste hel, den er vi der,” (We have to go over the next hill, then we are there”) coaxed Knut, again and again.
They knew they were in Swedish territory when they discovered a Laplander’s teepee-shaped grass hut beyond one of the hills; it had a stove and a supply of dry wood. Half of the party spent the night there, the other half slept in another hut a few minutes away.
It was the first time they had rested in two days.
They united again the next morning and were skiing across a lake when they spotted four adults and two children lying on the ice. Haldis recognized them: They were neighbors from Kjøpsvik who were also on the run from the Nazis. They had severe frostbite and had given up.
The Norwegian refugees now numbered 31. The Einarsens’s group assisted the others; it took six more hours before the exhausted skiers found help -– and were assured of safety -– at an electrical power station outpost.
The Einarsens and 64,000 other Norwegian refugees lived and worked in Sweden for two and a half years. They returned to Norway soon after May 8, 1945, when Germany fell and the 350,000 German troops occupying their home country had surrendered. Ten thousand Norwegians had died and half of its merchant fleet -– approximately 400 ships -– had been sunk. In addition, the land had been stripped of its food and few natural resources.
The Vandringen, however, still lay on the harbor in Skarstad…untouched and unmanned by the Nazis. Before escaping the Nazis’ clutches, Knut had hidden some of its motor parts in an elderly man’s kitchen cupboard in a remote area of Skarstad.
Knut and Haldis Einarsen, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1948, are proud great-grandparents. They celebrated their 59th wedding anniversary August 16, 2000.”
Knut and Haldis Einarsen in a chauffeur-driven convertible just minutes before the annual Norwegian Independence Day Parade began in Ballard (Seattle), Washington.
May 17, 2011: Knut Knut Einarsen, Honorary Grand Marshal, leading the annual Norwegian Independence Day Parade in Ballard (Seattle), Washington. This is the largest parade in the world outside of Oslo, Norway.
(The preface and article were written by C.E. Chambers and published by “The Journal Newspapers,” Lynnwood, WA, August 1, 2000. It was republished by the “Western Viking,” Seattle, WA, September 8, 2000. On April 22, 2011, it was republished by the “Norwegian American Weekly” (NAW), Seattle, WA. NOTE: Knut Einarsen’s nephew’s name was corrected from Helge to Endre.)
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