Occupied: A Novel Based Upon a True Story with Author Kurt Blorstad. (2021)

can talk more about that. So, Kurt, are you there.

was born there. But I really spent my entire childhood and teenage years growing up in Norway and didn't come back until I was seventeen because of the war. And the war really split their family. I mean they all went back to Norway. And then as things got better and the depression got better and in the United States, my grandfather decided to come back try to get established again, make some money, and make enough money to bring his

entire family back with him. The problem with that was the Germans didn't necessarily have the same plan as they did, and then invaded Norway before my father, brothers, and grandmother could come back. So they were split during the war, and it, you know, lent to a lot of interesting stories. As a child growing up, my father would say, oh, yeah, you know, I had to ski to school and do all those things, and you know I had to work

every day and just my life. You know, it was fun, but it was a lot of hard work growing up. It's nothing like it is now. As you would explain to me that you know you've got it easy. You know things are easy on the kids these days, and so you know, you listen to it as a child and you think, okay, yeah, it's like every other's father has the same stories. I skied both ways uphill the school and it was terrible weather and blah blah blah,

and you know, it goes on. And it wasn't until I got to be in my twenties that I maybe really appreciated it when I would hear my grandmother talk about the stories and things that happened. And this as a child when we would go over is nothing anybody spoke about. None of them spoke about the occupation, the war it happened. They all kind of were very close to the vest with things that happened. They didn't want

to say. What I learned later was some really terrible things, and I understand why they didn't want to share it to me or share it with me as a child or as a as a young teenager.

do everything. It was you and you and tore Off go do this, or you two go do that, and you know, very occasionally where they lit up and I think, you know, his brother was his best friend, I mean every even in the later years, they did a lot

of things together. They were both in the American Legion, the same legion hall even though they both were drafted after World War Two and my father was sent to Korea, but my uncle, drafted a little earlier, was actually set back to Germany during the occupation on the reverse side, which he thought was very ironic that all these Germans had occupied my country for years and now I'm over here in Germany trying to help, you know, occupy them and get them back on their feet at least I

guess for the West Germans, as the East German was still part of or controlled by Russia, right.

So it was my dad, his brothers and sister, his mom, and his grandmother. So there's six of them in a very small house, but they made it work. There was a lot of relatives living around, so they had lots of uncles and some cousins, although my dad and his brother were the oldest of the cousins and most of the cousins were much younger, so they got tasked with helping on the farms and doing a lot of the

chores all around the house. So one of the jobs that they I write about early on is my dad's uncle, Tarled had the largest farm. He was the only son, and the way things were in Norway is the oldest son inherited the farm or whatever property, and so he had taken over the farm when he got married at I think nineteen and basically took his mom and bought another house down the road and set her up there, but really wanted to run the farm as a man

and his family and start having children. And so my dad and uncle when they first got over there, he had a peat bog down at the bottom of the hill near the water, and the peat had to be cut every year and stacked and dried, and they basically used that for cooking because pete, once dried, is a little easier to regulate in a wood burning stove or in this case, a pete burning stove to cook with, and a lot of the wood that was used was used generally just to heat the farm, and so this

was a very arduous job for You can imagine a ten year old and a twelve year old with my uncle down there cutting out large stacks of pete, and pete is cut with a long spade in about three foot sections that are six inch by six inch, and he's throwing them up on the on the ground because he's down on the hole cutting it. And then they're stacking them and sorting them out and moving them around

and doing all that. And it's just a lot of backbreaking work of heavy things when you're a kid and you're lifting something that's forty pounds all day long and stacking it and stacking it. And I tried to reflect that really well in that chapter, that there was lots of hard work to do and they just did what they were told. In other words, this is just part of your life. You're going to do this. One day, you're going to help plant things. On other days you're

going to help harvest. We need you to fish. Everybody fished in Norway. There's water everywhere, so there's fresh water fish and obviously saltwater fish. If you lived near the coast and had a boat or could get out, which my uncle did. He had a small rowboat for a lake, and then he had a friend who had a power boat at the time, which you know, there weren't many of those. Everything was really sailboats for the small boats and he would take them out occasionally fishing and that's just.

and they're in five different grades. And in Norway they really were only expected to go to school until eighth grade, so it was optional to keep going to school. And of course my uncle and my dad, because of the war, both stopped at eighth grade and got whatever job they

could later on that actually paid money. But a lot of the jobs they had had as younger children, or just volunteer or day labor on other people's farms, helping them, you know, pick apples for the few people that had apple trees, or digging up potatoes, or helping run the horse, you know, to plow up a field. So the town of Vonsa down in town did have electricity, but as you got up the hill where they lived and just maybe a mile and a half out of town, electricity

didn't go any farther. So they had a well with a bucket and an outhouse and oil lamps if they could get oil in a couple of candles, and it was really you know, I just want to say, for this country you're talking back in the late eighteen hundreds is probably what it was more like than it was being nineteen thirties or nineteen forty.

sell it back, you know. So he would she would buy the wool and then spin it and then sell it back, and she was supposedly one of the best spinners in the town, if you can imagine in a town that maybe has two hundred people. I mean, but it did leave, we go to Vonsa, some of it would go to Farsen, and Farsen was maybe another mile and a half from Vonsa to the east, but also on the coast.

fishing boats, but that's how they were gathering information. And I think there's also one chapter in my book right before the war starts where they go out and their uncle Tarl notices this that these ships are doing some weird things really close to the shore, and he goes to the doctor, who I learned later on was part of the mill Org later on, and they were sharing information with the British and other countries to say look, we think this is coming. It's coming, And then of

course it did. Three days later, the Germans actually invaded Oslo and I think Bergen and christian Son and a lot of the larger coastal cities on southern Norway. And they didn't really get to Vonsa until about a week later because they just figured, you know, little towns like this, we'll just well.

and just figured the Norwegians weren't ready. Well. Fortunately, the commander of one of the islands in the fjord just south of Norway, and I can't remember the name at this point, he was there with maybe ten percent staff, thirty percent staff and just could see this coming and knew, okay, this is not good. There's no reason they should be

this far up. It was an old torpedo battery in an island, and they did have some surface guns, but they fortunately were able to get off two or three torpedoes and sunk the main ship coming up the fjord at that time, and it caused the rest of the ships to retreat, which then gave the Norwegians two or three days of really just battling the paratroopers, which they could hold off because there weren't as many as you

would think. They were just so confident they were just going to land and move people off the ship and just take over the city. Now, this did allow the king the ability and the governing body to kind of

retreat and decide what to do. So the Battle of also was a very large battle for Norway at the time, and if you can imagine that, you know, we think of communication as things that happened instantly now, but back then it really took Vonsa about a week to hear about the Battle of Oslo, and even then it was you know, pieces and parts and what to believe, what not to believe, But obviously because it was such a great story of the Norwegians fighting off the Germans that

that was the you know, the truth, and it was the easy story to believe, and so that's the one that I depict.

he actually left. They went up through Sweden through the middle of Norway, which you can imagine, you know, the coast seems like it might be easy to conquer, but there's lots of parks in the central part of Norway that I don't think the Germans ever went to. If it just was so remote they didn't need it, if it wasn't on a waterway. Most of the times I don't think the Germans were really worried about what was going on in other parts because it was so rural and so remote.

That really helped them produce all their airplanes and their tanks and everything else that they needed for the war.

the Germans from getting all these supplies. And the Germans basically invaded about five days prior to the British proposing that and saying look, we want to come in help defend you. And so I don't know if you know, the Germans knew what the British were doing, or if they just got lucky with their timing.

He just had lots of odd jobs because anything to get food, which was scarce even when the war started, and became more scarce as the war went on, and the Germans just pretty much took everything they needed and left almost nothing. But with the strategic I guess being south, the Germans built an airfield which is still in operation. Obviously it's a little larger than it was, but it's not a commercial airfield by any means. It's still a

small private airport. But when they built the airfield, they brought in all the prisoners and built a prison camp because they at that point had lots of prisoners from I guess Poland and Russia, And my dad said most of the prisoners were Polish, very few were Russian at

the time, and used them to build everything. The prisoners built their own prison camp, then built the airfield, and then there was a lot of They put some caves or tunnels in the side of the mountains at the low end, and they brought buzz bombs over near the very end of the war and they were hiding buzz

bombs in there and then launching them at night. So I don't know if they were launching into England because England was kind of a long shot and I'm not sure how far the buzz bombs could go, but I think it's possible they were, and that they might have also once D Day and the Allied forces came into France, might have used it to bomb the Allies in France too,

once they'd come in with the buzz bombs. But he he did tell me one good story of he and his brothers and his sister sitting up on the hill just watching them at night, you know, launched the buzz bombs, because to them it was kind of like this huge fireworks nothing, that's something they've never seen before. So terrible as it was, it was kind of an interesting thing for him to talk about and say, well, it's just kind of amazing to see this, But yes, it was a terrible thing to happen.

started out, I guess the problem. I guess his friend was killed for lack of a better term, by the Germans who had had the job before him. So Tour had the job, and he didn't know Tor had the job until he went to work one day and mister Ellenis kind of explained how things were and what Tour was really doing. And then I think it was doctor Halverson who actually recruited my father and said, look, I

need a replacement. Well, my dad had been the watchman at the store for probably a year and a half prior to them for these secret meetings to just kind of say, Okay, somebody's coming, we need to go hide, or you need to you know, you need to change

what you're doing. And that's really how it started. So then once he was given the job, which I think it was in the last year of the war, when he took it over, his house or his grandmother's house, sat at the top of a hill and he called it a mountain because it's maybe a thousand feet up but was the closest one to the airfield and the coast, and they were the last house on the road at the very top, so there was no reason to go

any further. He would walk up to the top of the hill and from there he could see the airfield, what was going on the coast, and some ship movements from around the you know, the the western side down to the south, and he would just report on that and just say, this is what I saw today, this is what was going on. You know, these planes flew in,

these flew out. This was an attack by the British, which a lot of times they knew because when the British attacked and tried to blow up the airfield, everybody knew about it. I mean, you know, bombs are going off and people are running around, but he would try to say how many planes he saw, or you know, note, what did the Germans do? Did they go hide in

the cave, did they go over here? And there's that type of information I believe, when passed on, helped the Allies decide, Okay, maybe we should attack from this direction, or maybe we should attack from a really low profile so they don't see us coming, you know, stick right along the water, or bomb from really up high. There really weren't many German planes for retaliation. He did talk about one or two dog fights that happened, and there

was because they were kind of mesmerized by it. It crashed, he said, maybe one hundred yards from one of the airplanes. And it wasn't until they were looking up in the air and saw the plane coming and getting larger and not really moving left or right or that they ran and he said, you know, it crashed on the hill maybe one hundred yards below us and was on fire. And it fortunately, in his opinion, it was a German plane that crashed and it was not a British plane, right you.

are you know are losing. You need to surrender, you need to help us, You should give up now, stop fighting back, those kind of things, And it was really my dad got information from mister Dungvold, who he was pretty sure had a short wave radio and it was the local connection for the EXU to Britain and to other parts of Norway. And if it wasn't for him, I guess being the lookout, he probably wouldn't have gotten most of the information he did. Hear of because a

lot of it was just tight lip. They didn't want people sharing the information because they didn't want to trace

it back to who originally gave it to them. So a lot of the information that he learned about, let's just say the Telemark and the heavy water and the stories like that, or on the Shetland Bus, which was a a western town where there was a family in a town that shuttled people at night to England and back and brought over commandos and took Norwegians that had lots of information that needed the British wanted from them.

And in that case, that story is when the Germans found out about the Shetland Bus, they went into the town and killed everybody, everybody, every male and every I want to say child. I think it was like twelve years and older and burned the entire town down. And it was things like that where those stories got out because the Germans wanted those stories to get out. It's like, hey, you know you're fighting back against us, We're just going

to wipe out your entire town. And that was the fear my dad said his mother had, and a lot of the adults had. It's just no, don't do anything. Don't you dare, don't fight back, which is why he felt so guilty by helping. But he really just thought that his friend who had been killed by the Germans for helping, he just said, they're just so bloody. We have to fight back, we have to do something. But I've got to keep it a secret. I've got to make sure my mom never finds out about it. I

got to make sure nobody finds out about it. And it was not really until his mom died that he even talked about anything like that. I mean, most of the stories the Germans were here and yeah, they took our food and they did this, you know, and we just were like sheep and we, you know, followed what they needed. When really he wasn't. He was one of I know many people. And later on from talking to I talked to an Arthur Hansen, who basically is the

same age as my father, did the same things. And it's just how I think every town had someone like my father, or had an entire network. If you can imagine a town with maybe two hundred people, and I bet you twenty of them were helping in the town, between different connections, people doing different things, passing information, and then you get to a larger town. I'm sure it's the same way. Every town had to have a story

like my father's. I was just lucky enough to get to write it down, and I hope, you know, people enjoy reading it and learning about it.

interesting stories about all her relatives. And I said, well, you know, I can't go back quite as far as you, but my father had a pretty interesting life, you know, the way he grew up born in Brooklyn, depression, moves to Norway, has to help out comes and gets occupied by the Germans, you know, comes back, gets drafted, goes

to Korea. I said, it's a pretty interesting life. And so I started writing down the one stories I could remember, and then to kind of confirm things, you know, because I'd mostly heard them from my father, I went and talked to his brother, I talked to his sister, and ninety percent of the time you get the same story. You obviously get a little different flare and a little

different point of view. And it wasn't until I went to Norway with my father, after hearing all these stories, I said, well, Dad, I really want to visit these places. I want to see the house you grew up in, I want to see the town, the coastline. I want to see all these wonderful things. And we went and visited all the relatives, and the same thing. None of them talk a lot about the war other than it was a war. When we went to his grandmother's house and drove up in front of it, it was like

he was fourteen years old again. He started speaking only in Norwegian, of which he had not taught any of us. Norwegian. Now we understood maybe just a little bit. And he's pointing, and he's looking, and he's got this great grit on his face, and he's just so ecstatic, and he starts running up the hill. If you can imagine my father at seventy running any of us at seventy running up the hill. It was flooring to me. It just surprised me.

And he gets to the top of the hill and there's these large rocks sticking out of the ground and large, maybe three feet four feet tall, and he's looking over the coast and he's just quiet, and you can see down and you can see the airport the way it is now, and you can see the coastline and he's just looking over it. And then he kind of all of a sudden, it like hits them like, yeah, there were a lot of great memories here at this house, but then there was also a lot of things I

did that were not great memories. And maybe we're against my mother. And there was such a strong family that, you know, growing up, even as a kid, for me, I'd go over and visit him. Whatever my grandmother said is what you did. You didn't say no, you didn't you didn't you know, fight back on anything. You just said yes, and you did it. And I'm sure that's

how he was raised. And then to get to that age where you're fifteen and you have your own opinion and you think, okay, yes, everything my mom tells me to do, I want to do. But maybe she's not always right. She's got her reasons for we shouldn't fight back, we shouldn't do this because I want to keep the

entire family safe. But every now and then, you know, he had to do what he thought was right, and that, really, I think is what hit him at the top of the hill, and you thought, you know, I did all these things, and yeah, he didn't kill anybody. He didn't, you know, do anything like you would think some of the great mill Oord people probably did fighting back. But he did what he could at his age to really

just you know, help and give information. And he was lucky enough that he knew a lot of the people in town and they knew where he lived, and he was perfectly situated in a position to see everything from where he was as opposed to having to go down in town and walk around and maybe look a little more conspicuous.

is still pretty good, you know. He would. I'd go often for an interview and ask him the same question just to make sure I'm getting the same answer every time, because I didn't want to think he's confusing it with something else. And even at ninety, a lot of those things he hit spot on every time he told me the story. And in fact, in one he started speaking in German and I said, now, you know, I don't speak Norwegian and Germans probably even less for me. He said, oh,

I'm sorry. He says he was telling me a conversation he was having with the German soldier, and so he just went right into German telling me the story.