Reidar Dittmann Narrator

Douglas Bekke Interviewer

Northfield, Minnesota January 10, 2007

DB: This is a Minnesota Historical Society Greatest Generation Project interview with Professor Reidar Dittmann in Northfield, Minnesota on January 10, 2007. Professor Dittmann, could you give me your name, please?

RD: Yes. It is Reidar Dittmann. Notice the double n. II

DB: And your birth date. GenerationPart RD: January 15, 1922.

DB: And your birthplace. Society

RD: I was born in Tønsberg, Norway. Project: DB: And were you born in your homeGreatest or were you born in a hospital?

RD: I was born in my home. Historical DB: You were. And was that typical of the time? History RD: That was very typical of the time. There were four boys in our house and they were all born at home. I remember waiting in the kitchen when my brother was born.

DB: And Minnesota'swere you theOral oldest, youngest?

RD: I was in the middle. Minnesota

DB: And your ethnic background. Now this might seem a strange question, but remember that Grieg has Scottish ancestry.

RD: Yes. That’s true.

DB: And there was a Danish occupation in Norway.

11 RD: If you look at my name you realize that I have German background. Although my people came from Germany to Norway in the 15th Century. So I guess we had squatters rights.

DB: So your family has been Norwegian for a long time.

RD: Hundreds of years.

DB: And your father. Can you say a little bit about your father. What was his background?

RD: My father’s name was Gustav, and he was a civil servant. He was born and raised in Tønsberg like I was. In Norway people didn’t move a lot back in those days. Today they move a little bit more. But you stayed sort of in your hometown and my family had lived in Tønsberg maybe for three hundred years. Always in the same area. My father grew up there and grew up next door to my mother. They were friends from their childhood on.

DB: So he married the girl next door. II

RD: Right. Definitely. GenerationPart DB: And what about your mother? Can you talk about her a little bit?

RD: My mother came out of a very old family that had originated in theSociety countryside. My father’s family was all city folk. My mother’s family came from the countryside, and her name was Solveig. Her mother came from about ten kilometers out of town in the rural area. My grandma was one of the five children, which was very typicalProject: in the country at that time. They had to have many children because they have to haveGreatest help on the farm. So she was a farmer’s daughter.

DB: Now I have a Swedish background, and in my family, and I think it was true in Norway, too, the names would change every generation. Often.Historical

RD: It would. History

DB: For instance, my grandmother was named Persdatter, the daughter of Per.

RD: Right.Minnesota's Oral

DB: But her children wouldMinnesota have had a different name. Her brother was Person.

RD: Right.

DB: Your name survived over the centuries.

RD: It survived because of its foreign origin and because of the fact that they were not growing up on the farms. If you grew up on the farm you took the name of the farm. So Norwegian to be topological. You know the Vangs and the Vangens and the Bresetts and the Langseths and all of

12 these are names of farms. But in the city there was no such option and we grew up with the same name all the way through.

DB: So it survived over the generations. Your siblings. You said you had four brothers?

RD: There were four of us in all. I had three brothers. I had three who were . . . one, my older brother Trygve, was seven years older than I am.

DB: Can you spell his name, please?

RD: [Spelling] T-r-y-g-v-e. Typical Norwegian royal name. Trygve. And he became a sailor and died abroad during World War II. My next brother Sigur, Sigurdnla, a royal Norwegian name, was a pastor and is a retired pastor and still lives in Norway at the age of eighty-seven. In good shape. And my younger brother, who is five years younger than I am, will celebrate his eightieth birthday this June. My younger brother was a college teacher and was, in fact, for a year a visiting professor at St. Olaf. II

DB: Your grandparents. Did you know them? GenerationPart RD: I knew only one of the grandparents. My grandmother. My mother’s mother.

DB: Who lived on the farm? Society

RD: Came from a farm. They lived in town. He married into a city family. I remember her very well but she was very ill during the time I remembProject:er. I remember her funeral more than anything else. I was probably only seven or eightGreatest years old when that happened. My grandfathers I never knew.

DB: Typically in Norway at the time you were growingHistorical up, because people lived close to the community where their family had always lived, was there a very close relationship between parents, grandparents and children?History Did they often live together?

RD: Very close. Very close. And very often they lived together. In fact, in my situation we had an apartment in a townhome that belonged to my grandparents, and so I grew up with my grandmotherMinnesota's for the firstOral seven or eight years of my life. We had a very close relationship with uncles and aunts and cousins, and even with second or third cousins. So we did live in a very close family group and so Minnesotadid almost everybody in Norway.

DB: Again, because everyone stayed close to home.

RD: Very close to home. Yes.

DB: And you mentioned that you grew up in a townhome. Can you describe what it was like physically?

13 RD: I shouldn’t have used the term townhome. I should rather have said a house in town. Our house fronted one of the main thoroughfares of the city and it was on the corner and it was sort of an L-shaped house. A very large house with maybe five or six bedrooms. It had a backyard and we had an outdoor toilet in the backyard. Always nice and clean but it was not the flush toilet that is common now. In fact, back in my hometown during my childhood there was a very important wagon that came by every week to empty the biffy.

DB: The honey wagon.

RD: Maybe that’s what it’s called here.

DB: Yes. It is. And then was that taken out and sold to farmers or . . .

RD: I don’t know what they did with it but it disappeared.

DB: Got rid of it anyway. II

RD: Yes. Got rid of it. Every week. And we thought . . . I thought it was one of the worst jobs in the world to be a coachman for that. It was a horse and buggy.Generation Part

DB: Yes. How would you describe your economic situation growing up in the 1920s and 1930s? Society RD: I grew up in a middle class home. We had no financial problems, but we had no affluence at the same time until much later. In the 1920s and 1930s I can never remember that we had any hard time. My father’s job was reasonably good, Project:but to feed a family of four was still very difficult. But I can’t remember ever beingGreatest hungry.

DB: And how would you describe your economic situation compared to other people in your community? Historical

RD: We were better off than most.History There was a great deal of poverty back in Tønsberg at that time and it became particularly prevalent during the 1930s, which was the same time as the Depression in America. The Depression in America meant Depression in Norway as well because Norway lived out of her merchant marine and there was nothing to do for the merchant ships at thatMinnesota's time. ThatOral meant that life was pretty tough. Although we never felt it.

DB: Your hometown was Minnesotaright on the coast.

RD: Right on the coast. It’s a seaport.

DB: Would you call it on a fjord?

RD: On the fjord.

DB: On the fjord. Yes.

14 RD: It’s Norway’s oldest city and one of the reasons why it was made there a thousand years ago was because it was a beautiful harbor.

DB: So it was primarily a seafaring town?

RD: Yes, it was.

DB: Fishing industry there?

RD: No. No fishing industry but seafaring. International waters. Rather large ship owners had their offices in my hometown.

DB: You said your father had a civil service job and there was pretty good security in that.

RD: Yes. It was very good security. He was the chief person in the office that hired seamen to the Norwegian merchant fleet. It was a very interesting job because even as earlyII as in the 1930s we would frequently at home get telephone calls from abroad. From Germany, from France, even from the United States where somebody wanted a telegraph operator, a first mate or a captain for a ship. They had to call my father. And it wasGeneration very interePartsting. My father would answer the phone and on the other side of the line they would say, “We need a first mate for this and that ship which is today in Boston. Can you get that?” And I could see my father sitting there, picking up the phone and sitting there thinking for a while, and thenSociety dialing the number. He knew exactly who was ready for that kind of a job and he had his telephone number in his mind. He was very sharp in that regard. Project: DB: That was a federal job? Greatest

RD: Yes. A federal job. Historical DB: And did the government provide the telephone service? History RD: Oh, yes.

DB: And so was that pretty unusual to have a telephone in your home in those days? Minnesota'sOral RD: It wasn’t unusual, but it wasn’t terribly common as well. I think that up and down the street where I lived there were probablyMinnesota . . . in two bloc ks there were probably about five or six private telephones.

DB: Summer activities for a young Norwegian boy growing up. What kind of things would you be involved with?

RD: Well, in the summer we were involved in simply going to the beach, which was seven kilometers out of town. One of the best beaches you will ever see. We would bike out there and spend the day having a good time. And on Sundays the entire family would go to the beach with a hamper with food, and it was wonderful.

15 DB: Were bicycles a very common means of transportation?

RD: Very. Bicycles were very, very common. Everybody had a bike. It was sort of a goal when you were a youngster to get a good bike.

DB: And did your father have a car?

RD: No.

DB: So when they went to the beach everyone rode on a bicycle?

RD: No. Then we would take a bus. When the family went out we took the bus. And my father’s office was farther downtown than our location, probably a fifteen-minute walk. My father was said to have the speed record on that distance. He walked to the office every day, and he walked home for lunch and back again to the office. II DB: Were there . . . were sports a common activity for young men?

RD: Yes. GenerationPart

DB: Excuse me. Let me rephrase that. Were organized sports common? Were there athletic clubs? Were there things through the schools that you were involved with?Society Or were most of those kinds of activities, if they existed, just organized by the boys or the families on their own?

RD: In the schools we had what they called gymnaProject:stics, and as we got into high school we could, as part of gymnastic hour, we Greatestcould be playing soccer. The game in Norway at the time was soccer. In the summer was soccer. In the winter it was skiing and we were all involved in that. I was never a very good soccer player. On the school team I was about third reserve on the soccer team, which meant that I never really got intoHistorical the game at all. But we did play soccer and in the winter we did ski. But most of the organized sport was organized by clubs rather than the schools. You never represented aHistory school. You represented the local sports club.

DB: They were organized by the city or the state or through the parks?

RD: It wasMinnesota's organized Oralprivately by individuals who were interested in this and that sport.

DB: They were private sportsMinnesota clubs.

RD: Private sports clubs. And I think that some of them later on and even today probably get some federal or municipal support.

DB: Did your family ever take vacations? Was that an option? And I ask that with the concept of a modern vacation.

RD: Right. In modern terms, I have to say no. When my father had his vacation, maybe two or three weeks, we would stay at home but we would go to the beach regularly. But we did not

16 travel. The biggest travel we did was to go to Oslo once in a while, and that was an hour and a half by train.

DB: And was that a big deal?

RD: That was a big deal. A really big deal.

DB: Do you remember the first time you went there?

RD: Not the first time, but I remember the second time when . . . in Oslo we had an aunt who was wealthy. Sort of the matriarch of the family. I enjoyed that very much. I remember she lived right next to Frogner Park, which is the famous place today where the big sculptures are located. I watched this huge sculpture park being laid out during the 1930s as part of my visit to Oslo.

DB: Was that kind of an inspiration for you for your later work in art? II RD: It could have been. I’m not entirely sure, but it could have been. I remember one thing. The first thing I remember from going to Oslo was to put the hand on the Parliament Building. I had touched it. That was very important. GenerationPart

DB: Almost like a pilgrimage. Society RD: Yes. That was a pilgrimage.

DB: Was working an option for you as a young man?Project: Was that something that typical young Norwegian men did? I’ve talked to someGreatest men in the States who would go out, not so much working, but if they needed to get some money they’d go out and find scrap metal and turn it in or they’d find pop bottles and turn them in for a deposit. Some actually did jobs, odd jobs, around. Some people worked in grocery stores or something.Historical Was that an option for you?

RD: It could have been, but withinHistory my circle of friends we never did any jobs like that. I do remember, once or twice, finding a pop bottle and taking it to the store and get the deposit back. Like a nickel or whatever it might be. But that’s only very rarely.

DB: Did yourMinnesota's parents Oralgive you an allowance?

RD: No. Never. Minnesota

DB: Nothing formal but . . .

RD: For three years when I was very young my father went to the whaling field in the Antarctic as an office manager on board the ship and I remember once he said, “When Mother gets my monthly pay I want every one of you to get ten cents.” Ten Norwegian cents. And my mother always embezzled that money.

DB: [Chuckles] Oh. You never saw it.

17 RD: We never saw it. She was extremely frugal but we never thought of that. But I have given my children an allowance, always telling them that story to make sure that they realize how important their little donation would be.

DB: For social activities, was there a movie theater in town or was there live theater? What kind of things did you do?

RD: There were two movie theaters. One that showed only Westerns.

DB: American Westerns?

RD: American Westerns. All the movies were American. And the other one that showed the general features. My one friend’s father was an usher at one of the movie theaters, and that meant that this friend became a very good friend because we’d get in for free. So I would go to the movies maybe from about the time I was about ten or twelve years old. Once a week. II DB: Were they subtitled or dubbed?

RD: They were all subtitled. All subtitled. GenerationPart

DB: But that must have been a good way to help you learn English, too. Society RD: I’m sure it was. We started English in the third grade anyway in the school, and by the time I graduated from high school I had learned English for eleven years and German for seven years and French for four years. Not as an option but asProject: a requirement. Greatest DB: Right. Now I know when I lived in Europe you could turn on the radio and listen to any language that you wanted to. It was something you can’t do here. Historical RD: No. You can’t. History DB: Now, when you were growing up, I assume you had a radio in your home?

RD: Yes. You assume that, but everybody didn’t have a radio. I remember when we got the radio. It wasMinnesota's in 1931, andOral I was then nine years old and the family would gather around the radio and listen to the programs, whatever they were. And we listened very carefully to the news program and everything elseMinnesota and if we couldn’t get to church on Sunday we listened to the church service on the radio. So the radio was a very important feature.

DB: And with the coming of the radio, did that change the socializing within your home, within your family? That people stopped . . . perhaps before that there was more entertaining of themselves and when the radio came did that change it more to a situation of people sitting around listening to the radio?

RD: I’m not entirely sure of that. The radio programs in Norway were sparse. The radio didn’t play all day long. It was probably on for about eight to ten in the morning for newscasts, and it

18 was on in the evening for some evening programs. In between it was blank. And it quit at ten o’clock at night and there was never any more radio. I can remember we tried to get my grandma who was ill to come in and listen to the Sunday service on the radio, and she thought this was very strange to listen to just a voice coming out of a box. So she didn’t feel particularly inspired by that. She gave it up.

DB: I guess what I was asking was you said that all your cousins, your whole extended family was nearby, and when you got together as a family for Christmas or some kind of a family gathering . . . did people produce their own music? Did people sing?

RD: We did a lot of singing. There were many people in my family who played including myself from the time I was six years old. I cannot remember in a family gathering that we ever had the radio on. We took care of our own entertainment. And I can also remember that the grownups had their chats and conversations, and we as children were meant to be quiet.

DB: You weren’t encouraged to participate? II

RD: No. No. GenerationPart DB: Church. In Norway you were probably a Lutheran?

RD: Definitely. Society

DB: Lutheran Church? Project: RD: Yes. Greatest

DB: Did the church . . .? You kind of indicated that the church played an important role . . . Historical RD: It played a role. Not as important as it does here, for instance, in this Minnesota setting. Here, when you move into a town,History you get your place to live and you have your job and you join the church. That’s sort of the thing to do. That wasn’t the case in Norway. You were sort of automatically a member of the church by being baptized in the Lutheran Church. Everybody was baptized in the Lutheran Church and there were lots of people who went to church maybe at baptism andMinnesota's at funeralsOral and at weddings and confirmations and such like that. In my family, my family was active in the church. Church attendance was not required, but it was taken for granted that we would attend church.Minnesota Interestingly enough, I went to Sunday school for many, many years and I went to the Methodist Sunday School for the simple reason that it was right down the street, and the Lutheran church was a little farther away. So I grew up in the Methodist Church in terms of Sunday school, but I was always a Lutheran.

DB: Baptized a Lutheran?

RD: Baptized and confirmed a Lutheran. Yes.

DB: Was this situation different living in town from in the countryside?

19 RD: I think it was very different. I’m sure that the church continued to play a much more significant, even social role, in the countryside than it did in town. The only time people would get together in the countryside, where it was some distance from farm to farm, would be at the church. So the church was far more important in the country than it was in the city.

DB: So the church wasn’t an important source of social activity and . . .

RD: No. Not in town.

DB: Not in town.

RD: Also we should point out here in context that religion was taught in school. Norway was by Constitution a Lutheran country and religion was taught. So we didn’t need the church for the teaching of the gospel. We had that in school. Sometimes with very good, devout teachers, and sometimes with agnostics. But religion was taught all the same. II DB: So the work was there. Back to your home. The home you grew up in. What kind of a heating system did it have? It gets cold in Norway. GenerationPart RD: We had stoves. Each room had a coal-burning stove. A coal burning stove. The house could be very, very cold in the winter, but the first thing you did in the morning was to get up and start the stove. And sometimes we had . . . in my part of the house we had a stoveSociety that you called a round burner. That meant that we put coal in during the evening and it would stay warm all during the night and then we’d fill it up again in the morning. Project: DB: And so as a child you had your ownGreatest responsibility for your own stove.

RD: Oh, yes. We did. And to go out into the shed and get the coal in a pail. Historical DB: Diet. What did you eat when you were growing up? What kind of a diet did you have? History RD: For breakfast we had a couple slices of bread with jam and milk. We never had juice in Norway. Even in the best homes. Nobody had juice. It wasn’t known at that time. For dinner we would have maybe meatballs or a piece of meat. Every Monday we had fish, and that was always fresh fish.Minnesota's My mother Oralwould go to the fish market and buy the fish out of the water. It was right there. She would never buy a fish that wasn’t fresh when she bought it. I remember all of these wonderful fish dishes. I hatedMinnesota all of them. I hated fish. And the reason for that I think was I was always afraid of bones. I had some bad experiences with fish bones. But we had pretty much the same kind of daily meals that we would have in the American Midwest. Except that it was less frequently with pure meats. Meat ground up, you know, to extend it. A roast, for instance, we would have on Sundays. That was . . . it could be a veal roast, a pork roast or a beef roast. But Sunday was roast time. And then about midweek we would have the leftover roast and make a stew.

DB: Was the meal, the lunchtime meal, was that the big meal of the day?

20 RD: Yes. It wasn’t served at the American lunchtime. The big meal of the day was at two o’clock in my home. Then my dad came home from work for an hour and then went back to work from three to five again. But the big meal was at two o’clock. And then in the evening we would have maybe sandwiches.

DB: A lighter meal.

RD: Yes.

DB: Did your family keep a garden?

RD: No. Not until much later. We stayed in this house in town until 1937 when I was fifteen years old and at that time we built a new house on the outskirts of town. We had no garden in the house in town. There was no room for it. But when we moved into the new place we had a nice garden. With an orchard and with a vegetable garden. II DB: But for the most part the majority of your food was all purchased then?

RD: It was all purchased. GenerationPart

DB: And so your mother wasn’t involved in canning or anything like that. Society RD: No. She went to town shopping every single day.

DB: Did she do baking at home? Project: Greatest RD: Mother was not a good baker, but in my home lived my aunt, my unmarried aunt, who was a little older than mother, and she was the one that sort of was the cook in the house. She was a marvelous cook. But mother was not. Historical

DB: Cleaning and that, was a lotHistory of your mother’s time spent . . .?

RD: Mother and aunt would do that. Once in a while . . . in the fall and the spring we had grand cleaning and then they hired somebody to help them. Minnesota'sOral DB: Just go top to bottom and clean the whole place up. Minnesota RD: In Norwegian they called it walls and ceilings. That was the name of it. And they would even scrub the ceilings and scrub the walls. We as kids hated that time of the year.

DB: With those stoves in all the rooms was there a problem with soot?

RD: I’m sure there would be. I haven’t thought of it but I’m sure there must have been.

DB: At the time it’s just the way it was though.

21 RD: That’s the way it was. You took it for granted.

DB: Laundering. Keeping your clothes clean. Now for one thing, at that time, it was very . . . a Norwegian closet or a trunk, which you would have had a free standing closet probably . . .

RD: Right. Right.

DB: Looking into it would have been a lot different from looking into a modern closet of a teenager in the United States.

RD: Very, very different. And you know, you’re asking a question I’ve never gotten before. Never gotten a question like that. But the laundry while we lived in the house in town was in a huge . . . what you call the brewer house. We did not do brewing, but that was the place, that was the name of it. And it must have been . . . in the old days they brewed the beer there. The house was very old. That’s where mother cooked the laundry. You know, the big laundry tub. And they put heat underneath it and the water would boil and that’s how she would do IIthe sheets and the pillowcases and maybe shirts and underwear and all sorts of things. That was a big to do every Thursday. For some reason or other it was a Thursday. I don’t know why. But it was a big event. GenerationPart DB: Were you involved in helping? Did you have to help with the fire?

RD: No. No. I stayed away. Society

DB: But looking in your closet at home. What would typically be in the closet in those days? Project: RD: In the cupboard. Greatest

DB: In the cupboard. Yes. Historical RD: A couple of shirts, piles of underwear on the shelf in the cupboard. Down below in the entry area of the house was another cupboardHistory where we had the outerwear, which was hung there. I can’t think of anything special. It wasn’t as dense as my closet here. We can barely get the coat inside.

DB: Yes. Minnesota'sSo it was a coupleOral of shirts, a couple pair of pants?

RD: Yes. Two or three pairsMinnesota of pants.

DB: A special suit for Sunday probably.

RD: And every year, early in May, we all got new clothes when we had to celebrate. May 17th was a national holiday and that meant that you got new clothes from top to bottom. New shoes, new stockings, pants, shirts, caps. Everything. And that happened every year at that time.

DB: And that brings up a point of just how were things celebrated in Norway? Now you said May 17th.

22 RD: May 17th was a major national holiday, the major national holiday. I’m sure I looked forward to May 17th more than I did to Christmas.

DB: So how would that be commemorated?

RD: It would be commemorated starting out at seven o’clock in the morning with a marching band going through town waking people up. Then at eight o’clock the cannons at the fortress— we have a medieval fortress in my hometown—the cannons would fire a twenty-one gun salute. And then for the rest of the day we would be going in processions. I would get fifty cents. Everybody. All my brothers got fifty cents on Syttende Mai to buy what they really wanted. And for fifty cents you could get five ice cream cones, maybe a chocolate bar and . . . you know, it was a lot of money. But the important thing for us, as I think back on my childhood, was all the things we were free to buy, all the sweets you could buy on Syttende Mai. And the flags were flying everywhere. It was a sea of flags. And it’s exactly the same today. There is no difference. The same. It’s celebrated in the same naïve but impressive way even today. II DB: Kids probably get more than fifty cents today though.

RD: I’m sure they get a lot more than fifty cents. GenerationPart

DB: What about Christmas? How would that be celebrated? Society RD: Very much like here in the Midwest. In fact, we celebrated Norwegian Christmas in this house. Actually, the Christmas celebration started in my hometown a little bit earlier than Christmas, because about a week before ChristmasProject: the farmers would come in from the country with the meat, which was always pork.Greatest There were so many they would line up outside our house because we lived on the main thoroughfare. And early in the morning, ice cold as could be, from about seven o’clock they started lining up. They had to line up because the meat had to be inspected by the health inspector. And so they sat Historicaland waited and my mother and my aunt would prepare hot coffee and go out and give the farmers coffee as they stood there waiting. They stood like this trying to get circulation Historyinto their bodies. But that was sort of the Christmas. When that happened then Christmas was nearby. The main celebration on Christmas was Christmas Eve, which started at one o’clock with the rice porridge. The rice porridge had a blanched almond in it and the one that got the almond got a prize and was the first one to open the gifts on Christmas Eve. The Minnesota'sday of Christmas,Oral which in America many times is the principle day, was a very quiet family day with very little celebration. Minnesota DB: And what would you typically expect to get for gifts?

RD: As a little child, maybe I was five or six years old, I remember our big gifts came from the wealthy aunt in Oslo who came home for Christmas. Because that was also her home where she had grown up. She came with all kinds of interesting toys.

DB: So you were glad to see her come?

23 RD: I was very glad to see her come. We went to the railway station to wait for her in a row. The whole family lined up waiting for her and carrying her bags with her gifts. My favorite gift I received from my Aunt Anna’s husband, who was my uncle by marriage. He was a very rich man. He was the chief executive officer of Norway’s largest insurance company and he loved to go downtown and buy toys for these nephews that he had. The one I remember was a monkey that turned somersaults. Winding it up and it turned somersaults. I don’t know whatever happened to it. I loved that toy and I loved it at least for one year and then maybe it disappeared. I don’t know. Otherwise we would get books for Christmas. With our neighbors we compared how many books we had received and which books we had received. And what we didn’t like, but always received, was some shirts and underwear. Soft gifts. Not particularly much fun. But we did get them.

DB: Practical but not fun.

RD: Right. II DB: And would you typically make something for your parents or your brothers?

RD: Yes. Occasionally we would do that. Maybe do somethingGeneration in shopPart in school and take home. Maybe a candleholder or some other simple thing. Or my dad would give us a certain amount of money and we’d go downtown and buy something for my mom. That was important. Society DB: School. What was the structure of the schools that you went to? Did you start out at five years old? Project: RD: I started out at six. Greatest

DB: At six. Was there any kind of a preschool situation? Historical RD: There was no official preschool. You could enter first grade at the age of six and then the elementary school was from the firstHistory grade through the seventh and then the middle school was from the eighth through the eleventh and the senior high school went three years beyond that. And everybody did not go to senior high school. There were lots of people who, by the time they were fifteen, were allowed to go to sea as seamen. Many in my hometown went to sea, and my older brotherMinnesota's started toOral go to sea when he was fifteen years old.

DB: I know in some placesMinnesota in Europe today there’s a test that’s given when the children are, I think, about twelve years old and that determines which kind of a school they’re going to go to. If they’re going to go to the college preparatory . . .

RD: That’s done primarily in Germany. Germany separates people at the age of twelve. You’re quite right. And that has been one of the problems in Germany. They have lacked a substantial middle class which has an education beyond the elementary school, and that was one of the reasons for the success of the Nazi system.

DB: So anyway, it wasn’t a similar situation . . .?

24 RD: No. Not similar in Norway.

DB: But at fifteen years old . . . everyone was pretty much expected to complete school through fifteen years old?

RD: Yes. You had to do that. That was compulsory.

DB: And it was free public education?

RD: Free public education. Free advanced education. Free university education. No cost for school of any sort.

DB: But at fifteen someone could leave school well enough prepared and get a job and support their family?

RD: Yes. That would be generally a menial job. You’d go as the youngest manII aboard a ship or maybe go out and do farm work or go to a shipyard or to a mechanic shop or something. But those who went to the middle school and the high school would anticipate better jobs. GenerationPart DB: And was there a strong trade school system in Norway?

RD: There wasn’t in my day. There is now. In my days there was not. Society

DB: So you got a job and you learned the job . . . Project: RD: You learned it on the job. Greatest

DB: You mentioned that language classes were stressed. I think you said eleven years of English? Seven years of German. Historical

RD: Something like that. We startedHistory either in the third or the fourth grade. We started with English and in the sixth grade we started German. Then in the eighth grade we started French. The language that was taught most poorly was French. The language that was taught best was probably German, and by the time we had graduated from high school we were fluent speakers of German.Minnesota's Oral

DB: Is that because of the Minnesotaproximity to Germany, trade connections . . .?

RD: No. It was, I think . . . the Norwegian school system was pretty much patterned academically on the German system and so many teachers in the advanced courses had had their training in Germany.

DB: Now I know from when I lived in Europe, every twenty miles or so the regional dialect changes, and I think in Norway it’s a similar situation.

RD: Even more so.

25 DB: But growing up in a town, what Norwegian did you speak? Did you speak the national Norwegian, if there was such a thing at the time? I’ve also heard that in southern Norway the language is heavily influenced by Danish.

RD: This could be a full program of interviews. Just about the language. But very briefly, there are two official languages in Norway. There is the Dano-Norwegian, which came to Norway during the four hundred years of union with Denmark, and then there is the native Norwegian. And the Dano-Norwegian is called Bokmal, book language. The other language is called Nynorsk, meaning new Norwegian, although it is really the old dialect. There are about three hundred and fifty dialects in Norway, some of them so different that I would have a difficulty understanding another dialect. But in east Norway, that is the area about the Oslo fjord where I lived, we spoke Dano-Norwegian, which could also called for simplicity’s sake, High Norwegian. The book language. The language in which the newspapers were printed, in which the books were printed. All the schoolbooks were printed in that language. However, our teacher might himself or herself speak a dialect, and we would accept that. II DB: So they weren’t required to speak that Danish Norwegian in the classroom?

RD: No. Not required to do it. You could speak your ownGeneration dialect. ButPart you had to teach grammatically or vocabularily to teach the Dano-Norwegian, Bokmal.

DB: And for writing? Society

RD: And for writing. Project: DB: The standard written format. Greatest

RD: The standard written format. Historical DB: No matter which dialect you spoke. History RD: Exactly.

DB: Written Norwegian was always the same then. Okay. Was your school system and the program youMinnesota's went throughOral fairly rigorous?

RD: Very. Very rigorous. MinnesotaThere was no such thing, for instance, as to miss a day of school except if you were sick and then you had to verify it by a doctor’s note that you had been sick. I know that high school students here sometimes stay away for a day or two. You couldn’t possibly do that in Norway. It was very, very rigorous.

DB: What was the consequence? Say you didn’t show up for school one day. Would your parents be notified?

RD: Oh, definitely. Immediately.

26 DB: And then what would happen?

RD: Then you would be called into the principal’s office and be given a lecture, I guess. I never did it, so I don’t know.

DB: But your parents were very strong advocates for education. It was the norm, it sounds like.

RD: Oh, very so. Definitely.

DB: For everyone in the community.

RD: Exactly. Exactly.

DB: Did you get a lot of homework?

RD: Yes. Not so much in the elementary grades. But once we got into the middleII school and the high school we had a lot of homework. And my mother would be sort of hovering over me all the time making sure I did my homework. I was very restless as a child. I liked to get outside rather than be inside. My older brother, the one who became a pastor,Generation wasPart very acquiescent about it and did his homework really beautifully, so my mother would always say, “Why don’t you do like Sigurdlna does?” But anyway, I survived. Society DB: Was there a lot of competition between students to excel? A lot of incentive?

RD: Very strong. Very strong competition. Project: Greatest DB: Your teachers were very good?

RD: On the whole, very good. I can’t remember haHistoricalving a bad teacher. I can remember some who were better than the others. History DB: Was there a national curriculum?

RD: Yes. Definitely. And national exams. And from middle school on there were national exams. Minnesota'sOral

DB: Yearly? How often? Minnesota

RD: Every year. In the month of May. And it was very important to pass those exams even if you had done extremely well during the school year. If you didn’t pass the exam you didn’t pass the grade. You had to take it over again.

DB: So there wasn’t a second chance. You didn’t get to re-take it.

RD: There was no second chance. I don’t know if that is the case now. I think the system is probably a little more flexible today than it was in my day.

27 DB: And how often did it occur that someone didn’t pass the test?

RD: Oh, I knew a lot of people who did a grade over again.

DB: So it was a rigorous program and it wasn’t that unusual then.

RD: No. It was not.

DB: What was the educational emphasis? Was it on the basics, was it on . . .?

RD: The classics.

DB: The classics.

RD: Yes. Again, the elementary schools were basic. The three Rs. We learned history and literature and . . . not accounting, but what we call regning, or algebra . . . in theII elementary grades. But then from the middle school and on it became more specific. We always had languages. We always had history. We always had literature, and that was basically the home literature. The Norwegian literature. But once we got intoGeneration the middlePart school and high school, there it was the classical system.

DB: As a young man what kind of goals and aspirations did you have? SocietyDid you have a view of what you wanted to become? Let’s say, when you were fifteen to seventeen. Before the war.

RD: Yes. In fact, all my plans fell apart during theProject: war. But then, prior to it, I graduated from the Upper Secondary School in 1941, whichGreatest was actually after the war had started. But prior to that I had decided . . . I was vacillating between two goals. I wanted on the one side to be an architect. One the second side I wanted to become a musician. And I applied for admission into the School of Architecture at the Institute of Technology in Trondheim,Historical and I didn’t get in. So instead I entered the Conservatory of Music and started serious studies in music. History DB: And was that okay with you?

RD: That was okay with me. In fact, it was probably the best thing that happened to me. I have a son now whoMinnesota's is an architect,Oral and that compensates for it.

DB: We mentioned earlierMinnesota that you always had a desire to study art, music, that sort of thing, and we talked earlier about your inspiration to pursue art might date from when you visited your aunt’s house in Oslo and they were building the art in the park across the street. You said that you played a musical instrument from an early age, so there was a strong musical influence in your family. You also mentioned earlier that, while growing up, you vacationed in a town where Edvard Munch lived.

RD: Yes.

28 DB: I read that. You hadn’t mentioned it. I read that. So what were some of your inspirations for pursuing a generally artistic career?

RD: First of all, my father’s family was a musical family. My grandfather on my father’s side was Director of Music in town. That was his job, and he was the band leader and the orchestra leader. He was also a teacher of music at the same time that he was a book printer. And my dad played the violin very, very beautifully. When I think back on holidays at home I always see my father playing the violin. As soon as I started to take lessons, I would accompany my dad playing. So that was one inspiration. In my home, in the old house in town, we had a very good art collection that my grandfather on my mother’s side had collected. That made me interested in art.

In the summers we spent time in Åsgårdstrand, which is a small village on the shore of Åsgård fjord. Åsgårdstrand was an artist’s colony, and very important artists from Oslo spent their time there, including Edvard Munch. I used to see him very regularly from the time I was very young, and I realized at a very early stage that he was an important person. I’m sure thatII my interest in him goes back to that particular time when I actually saw this important, great man almost every day in the summer. And occasionally he would talk to us. Have you been swimming today? What’s the water like today? A few little things like that.Generation Very simplePart questions, and this thrilled me. To talk to Edvard Munch. That was very important. And so I’m sure that had some influence on me. Later on, of course, studying music in Oslo at the conservatory, I had a lot of very good teachers who were significant people in Norwegian musical life. I learnedSociety later on of the importance, the very great importance, of Munch. I learned a little bit about his individual works that I had not learned as a child. So these are some of the influences on my life. Project: DB: What was his demeanor when heGreatest talked to you? His paintings are grim.

RD: When you saw Munch walking along the small streets in my summer town, he would always have his head up as if he were looking intoHistorical the sky rather than looking around about him. And he walked slowly. Never with any deliberation. He didn’t ever . . . he never talked to the adults, but he didn’t mind speakingHistory to the childr en. That’s why, when I had talked to Munch, I would run back to my mother and say, “I talked to Munch today.” And she would say, “Are you sure he talked first?” Because in this summer town people stayed away from him. They didn’t bother him at all and this is one of the reasons why he loved being there. A friend of his wrote a book aboutMinnesota's him, a bookOral that I also translated and edited. He took this friend to Åsgårdstrand on a visit and he said, “It’s too bad. I have painted everything there is to paint in this town and I would like so much to startMinnesota all over again but it would be just repetitious.” But this was a place that he loved. The shoreline. The simple houses. The rose gardens. Whatever was there. I go there every summer on a pilgrimage. Every summer. I’ve been there every year since 1952.

DB: This brings up a point. Maybe it’s reflective of Norwegian character. When I interviewed Norman Midthun he mentioned that one time, right after the war, he had flown the Crown Prince around.

RD: I know.

29 DB: And later he became the King, and Norm had seen him somewhere walking down the street and going into a flower shop buying some things. Everyone knew who he was, but everyone . . .

RD: Nobody bothered him.

DB: Nobody bothered him. And the same thing that you inferred with your mother’s comments. Did he speak to you first?

RD: Right. Right.

DB: And is that a typical trait for Norwegians?

RD: I think it is. Norwegians leave the other people alone and there are no paparazzi in Norway, you know, that run after celebrities. And is particularly the case with the royal family, which is so ordinary. They go to the regular schools and go to concerts and performances and to church and they’re just like everybody else. They make a point of being that way. I haveII met members of the royal family many times and they are easy to deal with.

DB: In the late 1930s, 1937-39, that period. You’re still inGeneration school. Part

RD: Right. Society DB: What kind of a political consciousness did you have about the big events that were going on in the world? Project: RD: Well, my parents . . . not so muchGreatest my mother, who was not politically inclined, but my dad was a member of the Labor Party. An active member of the Labor Party. So we were progressive in our thinking. We knew what was going on in the rest of Europe. We shuddered at what was happening in Germany and in Italy at the time. I rememberHistorical particularly one incident in 1935. The Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee, which awards the Peace Prize, awarded the Peace Prize to Count Ossietzky. Ossietzky was Historyat that time in concentration camp in Germany, and that was a statement on the part of the Norwegian Nobel Committee against the Nazi system.

Ossietzky was, in fact, not allowed to come to Norway to pick up the Peace Prize, and about half a year afterMinnesota's it had beenOral awarded he had died in the concentration camp. He died, in fact, in my camp. That was in the 1930s. The late 1930s. But we were very conscious of what was happening, and I can rememberMinnesota demonstrations in our city square against the Nazi system. I remember one episode when a radical group burned down the German flag in the German consulate in my hometown, which was a big event. These people were tried for desecrating a national flag, but it was a statement of how people felt about what was happening in the rest of Europe.

DB: Okay. You’ve probably already answered the next question. But I remember listening to an interview with Ingmar Bergman years ago. The Swedish filmmaker. He talked about how growing up in Sweden he used to summer in Germany, and there was a lot of sympathy in Sweden for the Germans and even for the Nazis.

30 RD: Yes.

DB: He said he felt it growing up with young German children, spending his summers there and going to their Hitler Youth activities and that. There was nothing comparable to that in Norway.

RD: There really wasn’t. In fact, one of the problems between Norway and Sweden was the rather strong pro-German sentiment from the Swedes even during the war. The royal family of Sweden was very German-oriented.

DB: When the Russo-Finnish War started, how did that . . .?

RD: When the Russo-Finnish War began, a lot of Norwegian volunteers went to fight on the Finnish side during the war. I remember . . . we didn’t think of it as the beginning of a world war. It was a separate incident.

DB: A regional conflict. II

RD: A regional conflict. But I know that it sort of decimated the Norwegian Communist Party at that time. The Party had been rather prominent. Not prominentGeneration enoughPart to be represented in the Parliament, but it was everywhere. Every town had its Communist Party. But it kind of began to fizzle during the Russo-Finnish War. Society DB: Had the Communist Party grown significantly in Norway in the 1930s during the economic hard times, as it had in many places in the world? Project: RD: Yes, it had. It grew very stronglyGreatest from about 1922 to about 1935. But in 1935 the Labor Party got Cabinet positions. The Prime Minister was a Labor Party member and that sort of mellowed the politics to an extent. Instead of supporting the Communists, the mass of people supported the Labor Party, which was a Social DemocraticHistorical Party rather than the radical Communist Party. History DB: So they had an outlet through the Labor Party.

RD: They had an outlet. They had an outlet. Yes. Minnesota'sOral DB: Had you traveled outside of Norway before the war? Minnesota RD: No.

DB: In September of 1939, the war began with Poland, and so the regional conflict is spreading beyond what, I suppose, was hoped to be another regional conflict. But how was that perceived?

RD: Well, I remember very distinctly the day of September 1, 1939 when the Germans entered Poland. And, by the way, the Allies had already, you know, declared war on Germany at the same time as Germany entered Poland. I remember one specific incident. The Allies confiscated

31 the passenger ship The Bremen, which was at that time lying in South Hampton on its way from America. And I remember this big headline, Bremen confiscated by the Allies.

DB: The German steamship line.

RD: Yes. But I had no fear at that time that this conflict was going to get as close to us as it did. The Norwegian Government called in the troops for the Neutrality Guard, but the Labor Party government had been a pacifist government. So the Norwegian military was in bad shape at that time. They were trying to improve it during the autumn of 1939. But with minimal success. So when the war ultimately came to Norway, Norway was kind of unprepared for it.

DB: Hitler justified his invasion by saying that he was afraid the British and the French were going to go up and occupy Norway and thus deny him access to the iron ore and other things from Norway. How did the Norwegians . . . did the Norwegians fear the British and the French?

RD: Not in the least. Not in the least. The Norwegians have always been anglophiles.II And in fact there have been tendencies in Norway in a minor way to join the British Commonwealth rather than to be part of the Scandinavian system. The Norwegians felt they had much more in common. Norwegians and Danes, by the way. Much moreGeneration in commonPart with England than with Germany or even with Sweden.

DB: Hitler claimed that he was going to Norway to keep the British andSociety the French out. How did the Norwegians regard the British and the French?

RD: The British and the French could come to NorwayProject: as much as they wanted. Greatest DB: Now when did you go to the University in Oslo?

RD: I started in 1941. Historical

DB: So in 1940, on the 9th of AprilHistory when the Germans invaded, you were still at home.

RD: I was still in Tønsberg. Yes.

DB: Let’sMinnesota's go back a littleOral bit to 1939. Christmas of 1939. You said that you lost your oldest brother. Minnesota RD: Yes. And the message came on Christmas Eve in 1939.

DB: He’s the one that died in the ship sinking . . .

RD: He died. He was brought ashore with tuberculosis in Java, in Bandung in Java, and died there.

DB: He died of illness.

32 RD: Of illness. Yes.

DB: Unrelated to the war.

RD: Unrelated to the war.

DB: But at the same time you heard that you’d lost an uncle.

RD: Yes. And he was lost in the torpedo attack on a Norwegian ship in the Bay of Biscay, and that was also on Christmas Eve. So on Christmas Eve 1939 we got the message of these two deaths.

DB: So the war is hitting home.

RD: The war is hitting home. II DB: It’s getting close.

RD: And even then I don’t think that we ever thought it wasGeneration possiblePart that Norway would be right in the midst of it. But by that time, you know, the Norwegian merchant fleet was sailing and subject to torpedoing, and lots of Norwegian ships had been torpedoed before the end of 1939. Society DB: As it approaches April, the German invasion was April 9th, were tensions increasing? Were there strong indications the Germans were going to do something, or was it a complete surprise? Project: RD: Something happened on the 8th Greatestof April. I remember listening to the radio and we learned that a German ship had gone down outside the city of Kristiansand on the southern tip of Norway, and the Norwegian Navy and the Coast Guard had gone out to rescue these people and everybody who was rescued was in full military gear.Historical

DB: That’s not Navy clothing. History

RD: No, no. Not Navy clothing. Army clothing. And the Norwegians rescued hundreds of them, you know. Passionately. Being eager to rescue people. And that was then the night before the invasion ofMinnesota's April 9th. SoOral what these people had been doing is that they were waiting to enter Norway. Minnesota DB: Part of the invasion fleet.

RD: And a British submarine had hit them.

DB: When things were getting tense in Poland, and then the war in the west, in France, hadn’t started yet until June of 1940, what the Germans called the Sitzenkreig and the war in Finland. Did you ever consider entering the military? Were you still too young?

RD: Never. Never.

33 DB: How about other people around you?

RD: I was anti-military.

DB: You mentioned that some had gone to Finland. So in your community there wasn’t a rush to join the military or anything like that.

RD: Not to join the military. Although when the occupation came, you know, on the 9th of April, there were hundreds who volunteered to get into the military. But then Norway was totally disorganized and unprepared for this. Very little happened. But what happened was that in the course of that first month of the occupation maybe about fifteen thousand Norwegians got into the military and started to resist the onslaught of the Germans.

DB: What was your personal first indication of the invasion?

RD: I woke up in the middle of the night to the detonation of artillery fire. II

DB: In your town? GenerationPart RD: In my hometown, which is within earshot of the coastal batteries that defend the entry to the city of Oslo. Society DB: So you were hearing the fighting in Oslo.

RD: I heard the fighting in the Oslo fjord, in the ouProject:ter part of the Oslo fjord where the Germans actually zigzagged past the coastal batteriesGreatest and entered the inner part of the fjord. But I heard this and went down and turned on the radio and heard the very dire announcement that our country is being invaded by the German Armed Forces. Historical DB: And what did you think? History RD: I didn’t know what to think. I talked to my dad about it and I said, “Shouldn’t I volunteer for service?” And he said, “You’re too young.” But the police station in town was flooded with young people who wanted to join the military. Minnesota'sOral DB: And so how long was it until the Germans arrive in your hometown? Minnesota RD: I think they came about ten to fourteen days later. They came marching into town. Coming by train to my hometown from Oslo and then marching into the coastal batteries to occupy those areas. Maybe a few hundred of them.

DB: So that was your first contact with them. Do you remember seeing them march in?

RD: Oh, yes. I remember it very well. Very well.

DB: It must have been a . . .

34 RD: It was a strange feeling.

DB: Yes.

RD: I remember feeling helpless. There was nothing we could do about it. They entered Norway with 285,000 men and the Norwegian military consisted of 15,000. But it took the Norwegians two months to surrender. They fought in North Norway until the 9th of June. From the 9th of April to the 9th of June, and it took the Germans three weeks to take Holland, Belgium, and France. So the Norwegians did pretty well.

DB: And of course the British and the French did send contingents up to Norway.

RD: They did. They did.

DB: Large sea battles and land battles. II RD: In Narvik.

DB: In Narvik and Dombås. GenerationPart

RD: Right. Right. Society DB: What was your first personal contact with the Germans? Did the Germans stay pretty much garrisoned in the fortress? Project: RD: Yes, they stayed garrisoned. I sawGreatest them in town always but we always walked way out, you know. If they happened to be in a bus and they were sitting next to you, you would get up and go away. Sort of a silent demonstration against them. But I can’t remember any personal contact with any German until I was finally apprehended. Historical

DB: Did they make an effort to beHistory friendly or were they just a presence that was there?

RD: I think they probably had orders to try to be friendly but the response was terribly negative on the part of most of us. There were certainly . . . there were Nazis in Norway and they befriendedMinnesota's the GermansOral very readily.

DB: How was the QuislingMinnesota government regarded?

RD: It was an aberration and nothing more. Nobody in Norway paid any attention. I myself knew nobody who became a Nazi. I had no personal friend or acquaintance who became a Nazi. But I did know of people in my hometown. I think that my hometown probably numbered at the peak of the enrollment in the Nazi Party maybe eighty or ninety members.

DB: Out of a town of . . .?

RD: Out of a town of 15,000.

35 DB: So very insignificant.

RD: But of course they took over the whole municipal system. Immediately. And my father lost his job because he didn’t join the Nazi Party.

DB: Even on his level.

RD: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

DB: Well, if people on his level are losing are their jobs because they don’t join the Nazi Party, and so few people joined the Nazi Party, did they just wipe out the lower level of the bureaucracy?

RD: The whole lower level. They did. Very definitely.

DB: Then how could things run? They must have created chaos. II

RD: Things didn’t run very well. GenerationPart DB: And who came in to replace them?

RD: Of course, in the greater framework, in Oslo, the whole system of Societygovernment really collapsed and it never really recovered properly during the remainder of the war years.

DB: Well, your father lost his income. How did theProject: family survive? What did he do? Greatest RD: He received secretly a salary that was furnished by the Norwegian Government in Exile in London. So we never suffered. When I was in concentration camp our house, which was a relatively new house, was taken by the Germans andHistorical occupied by the Germans for the remainder of the war. So from 1942 until the end of the war my family lived with friends and relatives in various parts of town while the GermansHistory enjoyed the home.

DB: Early on, while the fighting was going on in northern Norway, did you get news of the fighting? Did you hear what was going on? Minnesota'sOral RD: Yes, we did. In fact, during that time the radio stations . . . we had the radios. But after about half a year the GermansMinnesota confiscated all the radios. There were no radios available except secretly. But we did know the news. And even during the peak of the occupation there were secret newspapers being circulated throughout Norway and plenty of them in my hometown. So we did know what was happening.

DB: In October of 1940, you were arrested in your hometown for leading patriotic songs.

RD: Right.

DB: And what was that situation? Was it just a spontaneous gathering of students?

36 RD: Well, it wasn’t entirely spontaneous. Quisling had sent to my hometown his minister of propaganda to give a speech to tell us about all the wonderful things that were going to happen now that we had been so fortunate as to be occupied by the Germans. And people were curious about this. Insecure about what was happening. And I think that many had decided to go and listen to the minister of propaganda who was speaking in the movie theater in town, which seated twelve hundred people. We who were in high school at the time gathered outside the movie theater and told people not to go in, because they said the place is going to be sabotaged. We had no idea, but that’s how we were talking.

DB: Just making it up.

RD: Just making it up. And so people didn’t go in. By the time the minister of propaganda came onto the speaker’s stand he faced an audience of about fifty people who were local Nazis. Outside were all these people who had nothing to do, and somebody said, “Let’s start singing songs.” There were posters on lampposts and everywhere it said that you were subject to imprisonment if you do so and so, and one of the things you couldn’t do was IIto sing in public. That was prohibited by the Germans. So we did sing in public and the singing didn’t go very well until somebody said, “Reidar Dittmann is here.” I was the conductor of the local youth choir. “Why doesn’t he lead us in singing?” So I did that.Generation I was hoistedPart up on a ledge and I led the singing. Things were going wonderfully well until at my high vantage point I could see down the street the Germans coming with their bayonets bared and I jumped off and ran away as fast as I could. Stayed outside during the night in the woods, nearby woods, whereSociety I knew the caves that were there. I went back Monday morning when everything was nice and quiet. I came into my home and in my home were two German officers waiting for me. Project: DB: They knew you by name. Greatest

RD: They knew my name. Somebody had said, “This is Reidar Dittmann.” Whoever it was who had said it. Maybe inadvertently, or perhaps deliberately.Historical Pointed to me. And I was apprehended for having instigated this demonstration, which I hadn’t done. I wish I had. But I was sort of an accidental participant. But they hadHistory to have somebody. And so I was taken to the local jail.

DB: Were the Germans pretty rough?

RD: No. Minnesota'sOral

DB: It was just more of a situationMinnesota . . .

RD: They were very stern but not rough. And it so happened that the local jail was staffed with very good patriotic Norwegians, and the Germans hadn’t been able to infiltrate that system yet. It was very early in the war. In fact, the German civilians who would come to Norway to take over the civilian administration had been lost at the famous sinking of the Blücher in the Inner Oslo Fjord on the 9th of April. So they had nobody to take over these things. The prison guard and the policemen and everybody, the lawyers and the judges were all good, patriotic Norwegians. I was treated like a mascot in this jail. I was the only political prisoner my town had ever had in its thousand-year history. So I was an important person all of a sudden. After I had been sitting in

37 what’s called protective custody for three weeks, I was hauled before a judge, and he was another good Norwegian. He said, “I’ve got to give you a sentence, because if I don’t do it then the Germans are going to do it.” So he sentenced me to three months in prison for disorderly conduct. Paragraph 386B in the Norwegian Penal Code. But I was released again very shortly thereafter.

DB: How did your parents deal with this situation?

RD: They were terribly afraid about what was going to happen. They were not so afraid as long as they knew every day that I was still in the local jail. They had contact enough that they could, in fact, call down there and say, “Is Reidar still there?” And they knew I was there, and I was allowed to receive packages and so forth. I became very popular in the jail because I got so many packages that everybody got something, you know. But when I was released . . . it wasn’t very pleasant to sit in jail and I thought maybe when I get out I’ll retire from politics. And so I got out again and was met by all my friends down at the marketplace, which faces the jail, and I was carried in triumph through town. I thought I’d better not retire from politics asII yet. But that was my first time. And that brought me onto the German Blacklist, of course.

DB: Now think about . . . how old were you at this time?Generation You werePart . . .

RD: Eighteen. Society DB: Eighteen. And you think about what motivates people to resist or to be a protestor or to be in a resistance movement . . . Project: RD: I suppose that nearly all of us feltGreatest angered by what had happened to them, to the country. And our anger was directed at the Germans and at their henchmen in Norway. And I think that what I did when I was in the crowd, you know—I had no plans of being a leader of any sort. But I felt that we were just demonstrating against somethingHistorical that we thought shouldn’t be a part of our lives. History DB: So you were kind of inadvertently pulled in and then . . .

RD: Inadvertently pulled in. I was . . . I never did anything heroic. Minnesota'sOral DB: You went to work as a clerk in a shipyard at one point. Minnesota RD: Yes. Right.

DB: And it was here that you were arrested a second time.

RD: Right.

DB: Okay. Now you were arrested because a ship was made in this Norwegian shipyard and when it was launched it sank.

38 RD: It sank. Yes. Right.

DB: But did you really have anything to do with that?

RD: Not anything other than making sure that the ship was never finished. And there were 1,500 workers in the yard and I think that 1,459 were members of the underground. I don’t know. I have no idea. Because we didn’t know more than three or four other people. But if you had a chance to look at the yard during the days of the occupation it would be like looking at a movie in extreme slow motion. It took forever to do anything, and so what the workers had decided to do was to make sure that things were going so slowly that by the time the war was over maybe those ships would be ready, but not before.

DB: They’d be ready for the liberation. Not the occupation.

RD: In a sense. In a sense. But then the Germans sent an ultimatum to the yard that a ship had to be launched. And I had nothing to do with the actual sabotage except that I hadII been one that reported to the underground about the progress or lack of progress of the work.

DB: Was there, at this point, specifically in the shipyard,Generation really an organizedPart underground?

RD: I think it was definitely organized. Definitely organized. Society DB: Amongst the workers?

RD: Amongst the workers. Interestingly, the directorProject: of the shipyard was an ardent Nazi and he was not put in there during the occupation.Greatest He had been an ardent Nazi all his adult life. And that made the yard workers even more intensely anti-German, anti-Nazi. Because of him.

DB: But you weren’t actually a part of that organization—likeHistorical when you think of the resistance, when you think of the organized cells . . . History RD: Not. I was not.

DB: You were a sympathizer . . . Minnesota'sOral RD: A sympathizer. Minnesota DB: But not an active supporter of an organization.

RD: Correct. Correct.

DB: You were arrested for that. Your name was on the blacklist. And what was the circumstance of that?

RD: The circumstance. It turned out I was sent by the local office of the Nazis to west Norway on hard labor, and I was working in a village called Sauda.

39 DB: Is that near Bergen somewhere?

RD: Near Haugesund, between Stavanger and Haugesund. Near Stavanger and Bergen. And there was a German set of barracks being built there to benefit from the hydroelectric power that was in town. I worked there and because I spoke German I became a clerk rather than a worker. Then on February 2, 1942, the Germans elevated Quisling into a new position and made him minister and president of the Kingdom of Norway, which was a non-event. But it was something that had to be celebrated. So Quisling was allowed to release fifteen hundred prisoners, and the prisoners were released according to age. So I was released and went back to my hometown. That’s a long story. But I got back home and them my dad said . . .

DB: How is it a long story?

RD: Well, I was . . .

DB: The process of how you were selected to be released or . . .? II

RD: Probably. And suddenly I got a document, a release, and tickets to go from Sauda to Stavanger to Bergen to Oslo and back home. All of this wasGeneration sort ofPart unexpected. I came home and my dad decided that I had lost so much time that I had better get to the university and get started. And so I happened to get to the university at the time when the university was closed by the Germans, and everybody on the premises was arrested and sent to an assemblySociety camp in south Norway at Stavanger.

DB: So at that point you got picked up just becauseProject: you were there. Greatest RD: Actually another accident, in the sense it was an accident the first time when I was leading the singing, and it became an accident this time. Historical DB: You just happened to be on the campus when it was closed and everyone was picked up. History RD: Exactly. Exactly. But with my previous record such as it was, I had no chance of getting out of that. They arrested six thousand people on that day and ultimately released about four thousand. About a thousand were sent to camps in Norway, and six hundred fifty were sent to Germany,Minnesota's and I was amongOral thos e being sent to Germany.

DB: Because this was yourMinnesota third arrest.

RD: Yes. Right.

DB: And your name was on the blacklist.

RD: Definitely.

DB: Now how were you selected out? Was there just . . . you were put in a holding area and they found your name on the list?

40 RD: I was interrogated about three times during the month when we were in the assembly camp, and interrogation dealt in part with the shipyard and in part with other things. I had been distributing newspapers, illegal newspapers, and a few things like that, and they would also ask . . .

DB: So they knew about other things that you were involved in?

RD: They knew about some things and they suspected other things. They suspected, in fact, that I had been much more active than I was. They thought I was really kind of a big shot, which I definitely was not. But every one of these interrogations turned out very negatively for me, and when they finally selected people to be transferred to a concentration camp, I was one of the shoe-ins.

DB: When the interrogations ended and you were selected to go to the concentration camp, did you get a life sentence? II RD: Anybody that got into a concentration camp had a life sentence.

DB: But I guess what I’m getting at, was there an officialGeneration pronouncementPart that you’re . . .?

RD: No. It was not official. Society DB: You’re just going to the concentration camp?

RD: Right. Project: Greatest DB: And what was that process? You knew you were going to a concentration camp.

RD: You know, when we were in the assembly campHistorical in south Norway we elected a kind of a group of us to be the spokesmen. So we would speak to the guards about problems, and the person who was our spokesman wasHistory called into the office on Christmas morning in 1943, and he was told that the ones that are now left here are going to be sent to Germany. And I remember this young man coming in front of us as we were assembled in the roll call area and he said, “I have the honor to tell you that we have been selected to go to a German concentration camp.” And the termMinnesota's was simplyOral that we had sort of been selected to be the ultimate sacrifice, and we were put into trains. First we walked for about ten kilometers to a train station. Minnesota DB: Let me just clarify what you were saying earlier that it wasn’t that the Germans had propagandized you into thinking that you were honored going to Germany.

RD: Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.

DB: It was the honor of serving Norway in this ultimate way.

RD: Exactly. Exactly. And then we marched for about ten kilometers into the city of Larvik and put on trains, and then the trains took us to the harbor in Oslo. We boarded the prisoner transport

41 ship that’s called the Danube, which was a notorious ship that sent all the Norwegian prisoners to Germany. In fact, it was ultimately sabotaged by the Norwegian resistance. Have you ever been to Norway?

DB: Yes.

RD: Have you been to the Hjemmefrontmuseum?

DB: Yes. But it was a long time ago. It was 1972.

RD: In the entry area of the museum is a ship’s bell, and that’s the bell from the Danube that was taken out from the depths of the sea. But anyway, we were sailing out the Oslo fjord and along the Swedish coast . . . or between the Swedish and Danish coast. I remember the Danish coast being pitch dark and the Swedish coast being lit up brightly with one city after the other. Almost obscenely bright for the situation. And we landed in the city of Stateen, which is in Poland, and went into trains again and zigzagged through Germany and arrivedII in the middle of the night at our destination.

DB: When you say trains, were you put in boxcars? GenerationPart

RD: At this time we were not in boxcars. Society DB: Regular . . .?

RD: Regular crowded trains. But they were not veProject:ry beautiful trains. We had no idea where we were going, and in fact even when theGreatest train stopped and we were hurried out into the winter night we didn’t know where we were. But I remember walking. We were lining up five by five. In the concentration camp you always lined up five by five. Funf su funf [speaking German]. That was the cry by the guards as we walked towaHistoricalrd the gateway to this camp, and it said above the gate in brass lettering the motto of the camp. It said, “Recht Oder Unrecht, Mein Vaterland.” In most camps it said, “Arbeit MaHistorycht Frei,” but here it was a different statement. Right or wrong, my country. It’s an American statement. It was done by Steven Decatur when he lifted his glass to his fellow officers, and he said, “My country, may she always be right. But right or wrong, my country.” A very immoral statement, because in the final analysis it depends upon you. You decide whatMinnesota's it is right Oralor wrong. Anyway, it was such a bad statement that the Germans felt it very adequate to use as motto of a concentration camp. We still didn’t know where we were. We had never heard about BuchenwaldMinnesota at all.

DB: Had you heard about concentration camps while you were in Norway?

RD: Oh, yes. Concentration camps. I told you very early about Ossietzky, the prisoner who got the Nobel Peace Prize. But when we finally started the entry process, which was very complicated, we got a number, and the number started with KLBU, Konzentrationslager Buchenwald, and then the number. Then somehow we knew that we were in Buchenwald. But again, Buchenwald was completely new to us. We have never heard about it. We had heard about Sachsenhausen, the prison camp near Berlin where most Norwegian prisoners were held.

42 That we had heard about. We had never heard about Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen or Dachau or Buchenwald. But we became part of the population of that camp. I entered as 32232, which meant that there were that many who had gone before me. And when the camp was finally closed, you know, they entered prisoners in the 272,000 caliber. And never had the population exceeded 30,000.

DB: So you came into the camp. You walked through the gate and then what happened?

RD: Then we assembled at the roll call area, with the gallows rising in the center, and we saw on the right side the smoky chimney of the crematorium. Then we went into the entry process. First of all, we shed all our clothes and then ran naked through corridors stopping at various desks to list our names and so forth. Finally get into the bath area where we had to dive into a solution of carbolic acid and then to the barber to have all the hair on our body shaved. And then, ultimately, we were clothed in striped uniforms and got our little ticket with our number.

DB: The patch sewn on the front. II

RD: Patch. And then, ultimately, we came into Block 41, which was a place where incoming prisoners were kept in isolation for the possibility of illness,Generation I suppose.Part

DB: Did they sew a red triangle on? Political prisoner? Society RD: We didn’t get a red triangle.

DB: So there was no indication then, of why you Project:were there. Greatest RD: No indication of why we were there at that time.

DB: Just a number on your . . . Historical

RD: Just a number. History

DB: And then you went to a barracks?

RD: Yes. Minnesota'sWe stayed inOral the isolation barracks for two weeks, and then we were transferred to another, which was our permanent barrack. That barrack was fenced in with a barbed wire fence from the camp proper becauseMinnesota we were Norwegian intellectual Germanic material. We were not supposed to mingle with the rest of the prisoners because there was some plan on the part of the Germans to re-educate us. To make us change, probably, in their strange mind, by putting us into a concentration camp and hoping that we would see all the glory of the Third Reich.

DB: And join the master race?

RD: And join the master race. Yes. Because we were a pure race. We were all Germanic. For that reason we were kept initially out of the rest of the camp. But we quickly established contact with the camp as a whole.

43 DB: So it was all Norwegians where you were? You weren’t mixed . . .?

RD: We were very lucky. One of our privileges was that we were only with our own people.

DB: Was there a similar compound for Danes or Dutch?

RD: No. No. There weren’t.

DB: Just the Norwegians.

RD: Just the Norwegians were given that privilege. In our neighboring barrack, Block 40, most of the prisoners were Czechs, but not exclusively. And in most of the other barracks they were mingling all kinds of nationalities, which in itself was a hardship because sometimes you could not always make yourself understood. We protected each other in every way possible. Among us there were forty-eight people who had just graduated from medical school, and even though we had no medicines of any sort, they could diagnose things and help us out in thisII way. So this helped us a great deal.

DB: How many do you think there were in that NorwegianGeneration compound?Part

RD: In my group there were 348, and another group of 350 went to southern France. Society DB: To another camp?

RD: To another camp. Project: Greatest DB: What was the scene in your barracks? What did it look like? What were the conditions?

RD: Our barrack was one of the original barracks,Historical which was a two-story blockhouse, cement block, with toilets and washrooms, with four sections downstairs and four sections upstairs. There was a day room and a sleepHistorying room on each side. Symmetrically arranged from an entry area. We slept initially two in one bunk because it was overpopulated. But after a while we were given additional bunks and could finally have our own private bunks. It was a luxury for us at that time. Minnesota'sOral DB: And what was your daily routine? What did you do at this point? Minnesota

RD: Reveille was at five thirty, and at six o’clock all the prisoners except for us marched to the roll call area to be counted. They were counted at six o’clock in the morning and at five o’clock at night. We were on roll call outside our own barracks within the barbed wire fence. That started at six o’clock and then we had exactly the same routines, but they took place at our barrack rather than in the compound at large. After we got into our fenced in block we never had a real job. We never had work of any significance to carry out. In fact, the camp as a whole was not a good working place. The Germans, as I told you earlier, in most of the camps they talked about “Arbeit Macht Frei”—that work makes you happy. There was very little work going on in

44 Buchenwald. It was a waste of manpower in this particular camp. There wasn’t enough for thirty people to do something. Although the camp was surrounded by a munitions factory called the Gutzlof. Gutzlof employed five thousand people, and they were all prisoners. But otherwise there was very little work. You had to clean your own barracks, to sweep the roads and the streets, and to sort of do your own thing.

DB: Did the Germans enforce a real military discipline as far as the cleaning? Did they expect everything to be spotless?

RD: Very, very much so. Very much so. They would come in with the finger up on the top of the doorframe to make sure that there was no dust there. It wasn’t very dangerous to go through. It was okay.

DB: And what was your contact with the guards?

RD: No contact with the guards, except for we had one who was sort of in chargeII of our barracks. He would come in morning, noon and night and just look around. We had no contact with anybody. I never met anybody in Germany who spoke to me or who was interested in what I was doing. GenerationPart

DB: Just occasional, or regular perhaps, inspections coming through to make sure that everything was . . .? Society

RD: They came through. But he was sort of still in charge of that. His name was Spitz and he was an SS man. SS Deathheads. Project: Greatest DB: But he didn’t brutalize any of you or anything like that?

RD: No. Not at all. I think he had orders to treat usHistorical well.

DB: So this routine went on untilHistory the fall of 1944?

RD: Right.

DB: And Minnesota'sat that point Oralyou’re sent out to do labor work.

RD: All of a sudden they cameMinnesota to the roll call area and called out fifty names, and I was one of them. We were sent to France, to Alsace.

DB: You’ve been in a concentration camp and now you’re being sent out to France to do essentially heavy labor.

RD: Right.

DB: What was your health at this point? How had the food been?

45 RD: My health was okay. The food was so so. But it was enough to keep us alive. In the morning we got two slices of bread. At noon we got a bowl of rutabaga soup, and at supper the same thing. After a while we got a little better food than the rest of the camp, because I think it was a propaganda idea, and it was one that was never carried out in any meaningful way. But we got a little bit more food after we had been in camp for about three or four months. And we got maybe a little more bread. Some margarine to put on the bread. And I remember on the 20th of April, which is Hitler’s birthday, we got milk to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. But it was enough to keep us healthy. I lost twenty-two of my friends in Buchenwald. Most of them died from diseases that were not treated.

DB: Was that prior to the time you went to France or overall through the whole period?

RD: That was prior to the time I went to France. And in France we lost one who climbed a tree and fell down.

DB: He died accidentally then? II

RD: Broke his neck. It was an accident. GenerationPart DB: It wasn’t a suicide?

RD: Oh, no. Society

DB: It was an accident. What kind of labor work did the Germans have you doing in Alsace? Project: RD: In Alsace we were digging trenches.Greatest This was the time when Alsace was threatened by both French and American forces coming in over the Vosges Mountains. We were on the east side of the Vosges and we were digging long, long trenches, and we were digging some tank traps along the road. I’ve been back there many times and I canHistorical still see the pattern where we were digging. You know, you drive from the city of Saverne to town and you come over a bump, and that’s where we were doing the tank trap.History It’s still there.

DB: Did anyone try to escape when you were in this situation?

RD: We alwaysMinnesota's had theOral threat that if anyone escaped they would execute ten people.

DB: A lot of peer pressureMinnesota to not escape.

RD: Peer pressure and solidarity. We never tried to escape. I’ve often wondered afterwards, if we had tried to escape, if we would have gotten any help from anywhere. We were very close to the Swiss border, but the Swiss border was, of course, very heavily guarded. But retrospectively I’ve thought maybe it would have been worth trying. But it was, at the same time, dangerous. Whether they would have carried out the threat or not, we don’t know, but it was enough to keep us from escaping.

DB: They did other places.

46 RD: Yes. I’m sure they did.

DB: The Germans didn’t joke around with that stuff.

RD: No. I’m sure that’s true.

DB: How long were you in Alsace?

RD: From late August or early September until the 20th of November.

DB: Of 1944?

RD: 1944. Yes. And the 20th of November I remember so well because we could hear the Allied artillery getting close. We were getting ready to be liberated, and then they brought up trucks and piled us into trucks and moved us to the shore of the Rhine. From that time we were shoveled off and crossed into Germany into the Black Forest region, and then we walked forII five days until they finally got to another train. We ultimately ended back in Buchenwald.

DB: How did that feel to be so close to liberation . . .? GenerationPart

RD: It was terrible. It was the worst experience I had. Society To follow up a little bit on my worst experience. You know, during the time we were in Alsace, from about mid-October until the middle of November, we could hear the progress of the Allies by artillery fire. It came closer and closer. They wereProject: coming in from two sides. From Belfort, that’s the Burgundian Gate. That’s whereGreatest the French were coming, and from Remiremont, which was the Americans coming in. We felt that this had to succeed because the spirit in the camp where we were held was very low. Nobody seemed interested in trying to do anything until some outside forces came in on the 20th of November andHistorical moved us back. That was from Berlin, I think, from the headquarters. They decided that this group of Norwegians are not going to be liberated. We have to get them backHistory in there. And so we were assigned eight motorcycle guards who were Ukrainians. Ukrainian SS soldiers, and they were with us all the way until we finally got to Buchenwald. It was a trying experience. We were almost dying of thirst and starvation and it was the really worst experience I had during the war—the march from Alsace back to Buchenwald.Minnesota's Oral

DB: When you were in AlsaceMinnesota were your guards German SS?

RD: They were German SS. But in Buchenwald the SS was the SS Totenkopf, Deathshead. In Alsace it was the SS military that was in charge and they were better with us than the ones in Buchenwald. We had no real problem with them. They were SS soldiers who had been to the front and most of them were maimed in some way or other and were mellower than the ones we had been experiencing before.

DB: If you did your work they left you alone?

47 RD: They left us alone. One of them was Ukrainian. Another one was a German from Lübeck, and there were two Belgian volunteer SS people, and all of them were maimed in some way or another. But they were not coming with us on the march back to Buchenwald. The Ukrainian guards and one other SS officer were in charge of that retreat.

DB: How did the Ukrainians treat you?

RD: Well, they didn’t treat us at all. They were on their motorcycles.

DB: They just left you alone?

RD: They left us alone. They made sure that we didn’t stray. But we were not particularly fond of them.

DB: Did you have any contact with German civilians when you were on this march? II RD: Well, yes and no. We happened to be in Freiberg during the major air assault on the city of Freiberg by the Allies on the 27th of November 1944. I lost one of my fellow prisoners to the air raid. Then we had some contact with German civilians, becauseGeneration afterPart that marching from Freiberg toward Buchenwald we stayed overnight in barns on the way. In one case, we came to a barn, a big barn in the Black Forest. We had not eaten anything for two or three days, and as we came into the yard a woman came from the bake house of the farm withSociety a huge amount of steaming loaves of bread. And we ran towards her and asked if we could have some. And she said, “Well, it will be fifty pfenning each.” And of course we didn’t have a cent at all. Project: DB: And you’ve got your striped prisonerGreatest uniforms on.

RD: We were in the striped prisoner’s uniform. So that was the one civilian I had a contact with. She was absolutely not at all helpful. Historical

DB: No sympathy. History

RD: No sympathy at all. No.

DB: WhenMinnesota's you were inOral the bombing attack in Freiberg, where were you, just out in the open?

RD: I was locked in the boxcarsMinnesota at the railway station.

DB: So you’re helpless.

RD: Totally helpless. The raid came in two periods. One at eight o’clock, from eight until five past eight and the other one at eight fifteen to about . . . another five minutes. But after the first raid someone or other opened the boxcars and we stumbled out, crawling on our hands and knees to get out of the railway area, because we thought that the railway area was the principle target of the attack, which wasn’t the case. But we thought if we get out of here, we’re going to be safe. In

48 fact, they had carpet bombed the city of Freiberg completely. We lost three Ukrainians at that time.

DB: Three of the guards?

RD: Yes. The guards.

DB: Through the bombing?

RD: Yes. Through the bombing. I suspect that one of the Ukrainians probably opened the doors of the boxcars.

DB: So you got back to Buchenwald.

RD: Yes. II DB: At the end of November, early December?

RD: The end of November, yes. Early December. Mid-December,Generation Partin fact it was.

DB: Mid-December, and you’re not dressed very well. You’ve got your concentration camp uniform on. Did you wear wooden clog shoes? Society

RD: No. We had other shoes . . . boots. Project: DB: You had boots. Greatest

RD: Yes. Military boots. Historical DB: But just your thin striped uniforms. It’s cold. You’ve been starved really for several days. History RD: Right. Right.

DB: And did you have to walk back through that gate? Minnesota'sOral RD: Oh, yes. Minnesota DB: My country, right or wrong again.

RD: But then the rumor had spread in the camp that we were coming back and prisoners by the hundreds waited for us outside and handed us food.

DB: Really!

49 RD: Their little rations. Handing to us. There were really hundreds of them. Welcomed us back. And I remember the one who had been our block elder. He was a senior prisoner. He was in charge of our barrack, and he said, “I knew they’d come back.”

DB: Of course, you didn’t want to be there.

RD: We didn’t want to be there. But it was sort of a moment of triumph. We had been sent away and maybe our fellow prisoners in Buchenwald thought, well, maybe they’re going to take them to more propaganda, and maybe they’ll yield.

DB: But the victory was that you survived.

RD: We survived. We survived and we hadn’t yielded. So they were very happy to see us back.

DB: And you went back to the same compound? II RD: Yes.

DB: And what routine did you face then? The same thing?Generation Part

RD: The same thing except that things were unraveling completely. Society DB: With the situation with the guards in control of the camp?

RD: Right. And the camp had been bombed earliProject:er. The area surrounding the camp. So the Buchelstafworks had been destroyed,Greatest and a few prisoners had died in the air raid because they were working outside. Interestingly enough, the air raid was scheduled at twelve o’clock because the workers were at lunch from twelve until one. But that routine had been abandoned a week before. They were working all the way through. SoHistorical that’s why prisoners perished during the air raid. But we got back into the same barracks and we met several of our old friends and it was sort of a warm reunion that happened.History But the camp spirit among prisoners as well as guards was really lax and . . . well, I’m coming to the liberation.

DB: Well, there was a point when Hungarian Jews arrived in the camp. Minnesota'sOral RD: Right. I had forgotten about that. Minnesota DB: And that was . . . this was a different group of prisoners.

RD: It was a different group of prisoners. That was shortly after we arrived back in camp.

DB: Because prior to that almost everyone that was there, outside your group too, they were primarily political prisoners.

RD: They were political prisoners.

50 DB: But now this was the first time . . .

RD: In fact, there was one person with a Star of David in the camp when I was there the first time, and he was a locksmith. He had been saved because he was a locksmith. They needed him. But it must have been in early December when we woke up in the morning and we could hear the shuffling of feet, masses of feet across the frozen gravel. The lower area was called the kleinlager, which was a misnomer because it was a big camp. The transit camp was in the lower part. These Hungarian Jews were marching from the kleinlager to the roll call area five by five and passing our barracks, as we had just been counted. We saw all of these men, because the women had been taken away elsewhere, and they were of all ages. There were little children, toddlers. There were people of our age at that time, and people of my age presently, and there were some so old that they couldn’t walk on their own but were supported by somebody. There were some hadn’t learned to walk and were carried in the arms of fathers or brothers. And they were all going to the roll call area where they heard the grinding of the gas chamber engines. The engines. The mobile gas chambers. And for the remainder of the day the smoke was so heavy that we never saw daylight. That is my one overwhelming experience from myII imprisonment. I didn’t know what was happening round about everywhere else. I didn’t know about Auschwitz or Treblinka. I never heard of it. I didn’t know that mass annihilation was taking place. But I could see it in my place. GenerationPart

DB: Here it was happening right in front of you. Society RD: It was happening right in front of my eyes. And I remember then deciding that if I ever survive I’ll let people know that I saw this. But then we wondered, as the war moved towards its inevitable end, would the Germans let us get out, Project:you know. Or would they just annihilate us, too, with everything that we knew? ButGreatest we didn’t get to that point because in March of 1945 we were called to the roll call area where the commander in chief was . . .

DB: We being the Norwegians? Historical

RD: The Norwegians. [SpeakingHistory German] All Norwegia ns immediately to the gate area. And there were several people there. The commander in chief of the camp was one of them, and he said, “I have somebody here who would like to talk to you,” and he disappeared. And two young men in dust blue uniforms stepped in front of us, and one of them said [speaking Swedish], “I’ve come to takeMinnesota's you to Sweden,”Oral expecting a jubilant reception of this incredible statement. But none of us believed that that was so. We thought, why doesn’t he say he’s going to take us to the stone pit? Minnesota

DB: These were Swedes.

RD: These were Swedes, but we didn’t know that. They spoke Swedish, but were they Swedish? We didn’t know that. We thought it might be a trick. But then he said, “Before we leave we want you to go to your barracks and pick up your belongings.” That was a very strange thing to say because we thought that if he is an SS person, or belongs to any German agency whatsoever, he knows perfectly well that we don’t have any belongings. So we went down to the barracks and

51 back up again. And then the young man told us to line up two by two. That was very strange, because in Buchenwald you always lined up five by five.

DB: So they were really in charge of you. The Germans were just gone.

RD: Yes. They were gone. And we lined up two by two and then he said, “Okay, guys,” always speaking Swedish, “Okay, guys, let’s go.” And if it had been a German he would have said, of course [speaking German], “Achtung, acthtung.” But he just said, “Okay guys, let’s go.”

DB: So what . . . everybody kind of looks at each other and what’s going on here? And can you believe it?

RD: We didn’t even look at each other. I think it was all an internal thing for each one of us individually. But the wrought iron gate opened up and right or wrong was right behind us. We walked through the roll call area to a parking area where there were seventeen white buses. II DB: Because there’s maybe three hundred of you now?

RD: About three hundred and twenty. And a little streamerGeneration across eachPart of the bus said Välkommen [in Swedish)], welcome to neutral Sweden. It took us two weeks . . . three weeks to get to Sweden. We were transferred from Buchenwald to another concentration camp called Neuengamme, by Hamburg. What had happened was that Count Folke SocietyBernadotte, the international vice president of the Red Cross and a nephew of the Swedish king, had received permission from Himmler to take all Scandinavian prisoners for internment to Sweden until the end of the war, in return for which he would get something.Project: We don’t know what that was, because Himmler committed suicide.Greatest So the card was never called.

DB: Himmler was negotiating with prisoners to try to strengthen his position. Historical RD: Right. He was. History DB: He saved a lot of Jews, too. Odd to say he saved them but there were quite a few Jews too, that he pulled out of camps.

RD: Anyway,Minnesota's in NeuengammeOral by Hamburg we waited until the 13th of April. This was from mid-March until the 13th of April. And every day they came into the camp. Norwegians and Danes. Prisoners. So that byMinnesota April 13th there were 30,000. Very few people realize that there were more than 20,000 Norwegians in concentration camps in Germany. Another 10,000 were in concentration camps in Norway. People don’t know that. But on that particular day the buses came in an endless row from Denmark, and we were loaded into buses and traveled to Denmark, which was still occupied. But the Danes were still lining the highway with food and flowers and things. We finally got to Elsinore, where we were put on ferry boats that were lined one after the other. At eleven o’clock in the morning of the 1st of May we set foot on Swedish soil and the war was over.

DB: And then you believed?

52 RD: Then you had to believe the war was over. I remember the first thing when I got there. We were interned, a group of us interned in a small chateau in southern Sweden, and I took a one hour shower. Because we were filthy dirty. Had lice and all kinds of things. Buchenwald had become very bad at the end of the war. It was totally disorganized and bad. But that’s how it happened.

DB: The Germans started to lose control.

RD: Totally. Totally.

DB: The chaos of thousands of people coming through.

RD: About two weeks after we were liberated through the Swedish Red Cross, the camp was liberated by Patton’s armed column and when they came to Buchenwald they met two Russians and two Polish guards that had taken over the camp. II DB: Who had been prisoners?

RD: Prisoners. Right. And the guards had disappeared. GenerationPart

DB: Yes. Society RD: And interesting enough, you know, the prisoners . . . and I read this afterwards. I wasn’t there then. The prisoners did not mutilate the guards. They just took over. So when Patton came the camp had really already been liberated by theProject: prisoners, and th ere were then 35,000 undisposed of bodies in the camp. Greatest

DB: Horrible places. So you’re in Sweden just as the war is ending. How long did it take you then to get home? Historical

RD: Three weeks. Until May 28,History 1945.

DB: By the time you’d gotten home you’d had something to eat. You’d cleaned yourself up.

RD: And Minnesota'swe had new Oralclothes.

DB: Made yourself more presentable.Minnesota

RD: New clothes and a suitcase full of stuff that was given to us by the Norwegian Red Cross through the Swedish Embassy.

DB: So it wasn’t quite such a shock to see your parents.

RD: Oh, no, no. We had . . . and we had talked to them on the phone anyway. There were 76,000 Norwegians in Sweden at the time. Refugees from Norway, and prisoners. So it took a lot of organization to get them all back. The first special train . . . nobody was that eager to get back,

53 because we were well treated. In fact, we were treated like heroes. But I was in the first train that came back.

DB: And you went into Oslo?

RD: To Oslo, and then from Oslo to Tønsberg.

DB: So this is the end of May.

RD: May 28, 1945.

DB: This is about the same time that the American occupation unit is coming into Norway. Were you there when they came in, the 39th Infantry Battalion?

RD: Yes. Right. II DB: Did you see them?

RD: Oh, yes. GenerationPart

DB: Was this your first contact with Americans? Society RD: That was the first contact with Americans. And then shortly thereafter, after I’d been home for three weeks, I volunteered to the Norwegian Army Intelligence Corps and was an interrogator for German war prisoners in the campProject: with the Americans. Greatest DB: Now these Americans were in large part Norwegian Americans.

RD: Right. Historical

DB: And I know I’ve talked to manyHistory of these men and they had wonderful time in Norway.

RD: Yes. Oh, I’m sure.

DB: And Minnesota'syou had a goodOral experience with them?

RD: Very good. That was Minnesotavery positive. Everythi ng was wonderful at the time. You had to experience it to get a feeling of what it was like to be back in a liberated country.

DB: It’s springtime.

RD: Absolutely.

DB: The war is over.

RD: Yes. Everything is in bloom, you know. And life is in bloom. It was wonderful.

54 DB: And your parents were probably just ecstatic to see you.

RD: They were.

DB: And when you got home, did you find out that a lot of your classmates, your friends had not survived the war or what was the situation?

RD: Not very many, but about a dozen or so had not survived the war. Some had died at sea. Others had died in the war itself. And, by the way, did you know that Quisling organized a Norwegian Legion that consisted of eight hundred people sent to the East Front and six hundred of the eight hundred died? They were put into the front without any training whatsoever.

DB: Yes. Yes. What kind of stories did your parents have for you about the experience of occupation while you were gone? Did they talk about that very much?

RD: No. They really didn’t. They talked about the fact that they were always IIwondering what I was doing and how I was doing, about whether I would survive or not. But my parents were not very chatty. GenerationPart DB: And did you tell them about your experiences?

RD: To an extent. To an extent. You know, those experiences were so muchSociety in the shadow by the joy of being there again.

DB: Sure. And you wanted to put them behind you,Project: probably. Greatest RD: In a way, yes.

DB: So you’re in Oslo, and you’re working for NorwegianHistorical Intelligence, and you have contact with the Americans. History RD: I was in a camp, actually.

DB: And fairly soon after that you’re on your way to the United States. Minnesota'sOral RD: Yes. Right. Minnesota DB: In the early fall of 1945?

RD: Yes. In October.

DB: How did that come about? How did you make the contacts . . .?

RD: Another sort of long story, but in Buchenwald I organized a choir. I had a small group of male singers and one of my basses became a very important person. Norwegian Minister of Education. He called me up once I was in the camp and said simply . . .

55 DB: In the camp in Norway?

RD: In Norway. Without any preparation, he said, “How would you like to go to America?” And I said, “America? I never thought of it. Couldn’t you get . . . I would like to go to Copenhagen.” He said, “I don’t know anything about Copenhagen, but I have a scholarship at St. Olaf College.” And because I had conducted a choir in camp, he knew that and he knew that St. Olaf was famous for its choir.

DB: So this just came out of the blue.

RD: Out of the blue.

DB: Nothing that you had done.

RD: Nothing that I had done. And this gets a big laugh many times because I said to him, “St. Olaf College? I never heard about it. Couldn’t you get me a scholarship to goII to Luther?” And the reason for that was that Luther College Band had been in Norway in 1938. So I knew their quality of music. I had heard nothing about St. Olaf. But that’s how I got the scholarship. GenerationPart DB: Well, this must have been . . . what was that experience for you? I mean you’re going a long way from home again all of a sudden. Society RD: Yes. It was very strange. And my father was sick at the time. He had a stroke. And I went home and I asked my parents what they thought, and my dad said, “I think you should go. It’s an opportunity. You’ll never get it again. You betterProject: take it.” So I left for America at that time. And my dad died a year later, while I wasGreatest here.

DB: Did you expect to stay in the United States or were you just . . .? Historical RD: One year. History DB: So the initial contract was to come here for one year.

RD: One year. Right. Minnesota'sOral DB: And then your plan was to go back to Norway. Minnesota RD: Yes. And that’s sixty-one years ago, and I’m still here.

DB: So you took a ship to the United States from Oslo?

RD: Yes. Right.

DB: And you arrived in New York?

RD: Right. Actually, at Brooklyn.

56 DB: Brooklyn. That must have been quite an experience.

RD: It was tremendous.

DB: So what was that experience like?

RD: Very, very hard.

DB: You come in. I imagine you saw the Statue of Liberty.

RD: Oh, yes. We sailed along Staten Island coming in, and with huge lettering along Staten Island it said, “Welcome Home, Well Done.” That was, of course, for the GIs that were coming back. But I took it to mean that it was welcome to me as well. And we docked in Brooklyn at about five o’clock in the afternoon, and it was too late for us to be cleared by the customs. The customs agents were going home for dinner. And so we had to stay overnight in the ship. But on board the ship was a first mate whose niece was on the ship along with a groupII of students. And he hired his niece and me to be helpers on the ship, and then he took us ashore. Because the sailors could get land leave, you know, but we couldn’t as passengers. So I went with this mate up and down Broadway for a whole evening. From one restaurantGeneration toPart the other, drinking one Coke after the other. I’m a teetotaler. I don’t drink anything else. I never had so many Cokes in my life as that evening. And at about three o’clock in the morning he took us back to the ship. And at ten o’clock in the morning we debarked from the ship. Society

DB: What did you think seeing New York and the land of plenty? Project: RD: Oh! It was incredible. Just incredible.Greatest I can’t express how I felt about it. I had, of course, known a lot about New York City and had seen a lot of pictures. Seen a lot of movies that took place in New York City. I was not completely unprepared for it. Historical DB: So you hadn’t just seen cowboy and Indian movies. History RD: No. The other theater in my hometown showed regular features. It was an incredible experience. And then, at ten o’clock in the morning when I got off the ship, we were met by members of the Norwegian Consulate in New York. They took us to a bank. Each one of us had a check forMinnesota's cash that weOral had gotten in Norway.

Some of us got money fromMinnesota the government, but I had some money on my own. I had $350 in the check, and there were twenty of us who were students at that time. We were all taken to this bank. Upstairs at the bank we all cashed a check and got some money. Then he took us . . . took at least me and two others to a railway station, and we got a ticket to go to Minneapolis. We traveled via Chicago during the night, and changed trains at the station in Chicago. A very strange thing to do. Big city. I came in to Minneapolis at five o’clock in the evening to be met by a representative of the Norwegian Consulate.

DB: What was your impression of America on a train ride? I imagine a lot of it was at night. But still, the vastness of it.

57 RD: Well, it was very strange. I think I was awed to the extent of not being able to verbalize the experience. But I sailed along a body of water and I asked the conductor, who was black, one of the first blacks I’d ever seen, and I said, “What lake is this?” And he said, “Sir, that ain’t no lake. That’s the Mississippi River.” [Chuckles] And was sort of somewhere down by Red Wing. I had gotten that far. And that’s one thing I remember. But then I was met by a representative of the Norwegian Consulate in Minneapolis. He took me out to dinner to the Nankin.

DB: Oh. Is this your first Chinese food?

RD: My first Chinese food ever. And it was interesting. Then he entertained me for a while and put me on a train to go to Northfield. On the train to Northfield I sat there and I practiced my English. I said, “I am a Norwegian student going to St. Olaf College. Could you please tell me how to get there?” And I practiced this over and over again. And I wondered if there would be somebody meeting me. And if somebody is meeting me, among all the ones going on to Northfield, how is he going to know who I am? So I came to Northfield at one o’clock in the morning, and the conductor nudged me and said, “This is Northfield, Sir.” AndII he carried the suitcase out. I was the only one getting off, and it was pitch dark. And there I was in the middle of the night. All alone. Not knowing quite what to do. GenerationPart DB: And nobody to ask your rehearsed question.

RD: And nobody there. Nobody. I sort of mumbled to myself I am so andSociety so, you know. And then suddenly out of the dark came a big burly figure moving toward me. He was reaching out his hand and he said, “Reidar Dittmann, Velkommen to Northfield.” And it was the chairman of the Norwegian Department at St. Olaf. And I wasProject: home. And I have felt home ever since. Greatest DB: And so did he take you home or he took you to student housing?

RD: He took me home to his home place in the middlHistoricale of the night. We had a snack to eat and then took me to the Stewart Hotel, which is the hotel downtown. History DB: And classes had already started?

RD: This was the 23rd of October. They were in the middle of the semester and I had to catch up with all theMinnesota's other stuff.Oral

DB: Plus you had to keep Minnesotabrushing up on your English.

RD: Right.

DB: Was it fairly overwhelming?

RD: No. It wasn’t. I had had a lot of English in theory but I kept mixing English and German all the time.

DB: But still. Having to catch up when you’re that far behind.

58 RD: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. But I made it.

DB: The teachers were accommodating?

RD: Very accommodating. I was the only foreign student on campus.

DB: Really. Now I’d also read that at that time there were . . . 789 students here, of which only 107 were men.

RD: Right.

DB: You beat the GIs home.

RD: By half a year. By three months. They came the second semester.

DB: So what was that experience? II

RD: Oh, it was . . . you know, I felt I had a lot in common with them. I felt . . . I was older than the average student. I was twenty-three years old and mostGeneration of the studentsPart were eighteen to twenty-two.

DB: Most of them were girls. Society

RD: And most of them were girls, which was no hardship. I met my wife that way. But I got on very well with the GIs, became good friends withProject: many of them, and I’m still friends with some of them today. Greatest

DB: And coming to a small Midwestern town, largely Scandinavian . . . I’ll tell you an experience when I was in Oslo walking down the streHistoricalet. The first time I’d ever been there. I kept seeing familiar faces. History RD: Oh, yes.

DB: Because it was from that same gene pool that I’d grown up with. Minnesota'sOral RD: Right. Exactly. Minnesota DB: So I imagine you felt perhaps a little at home here. Some familiarity.

RD: Totally at home. I never felt strange here at all. From the very first. You know, you open the student directory and there were just as many Norwegian names as in the Oslo telephone directory. That’s not the case . . . not anymore. But at that time it was.

DB: And when you arrived here . . . this is an idyllic little spot. You’ve come out of all these hardships during the war, being occupied, being in the concentration camp, and you’re talking to

59 Americans about their experiences in the war. How were their perceptions compared to your reality?

RD: Well, as far as I can recall, the majority of the GIs who came back, came back from the Pacific.

DB: Right. But not just the GIs. Let’s say the home . . .

RD: The students.

DB: The students, the civilians living here, the people who hadn’t left Northfield during the war. Sometimes I hear from soldiers that they came home from the war, and they’ve been gone for three and a half years or something like that and through all kinds of combat experiences and living in a hole half of the time, and they come home and people are complaining that sugar was rationed and they couldn’t get gasoline for the car. II RD: This is very true.

DB: Did you have to bite your tongue sometimes? GenerationPart

RD: Oh, yes. I went to get some new clothes. I went into a store on the main street of Northfield. There had been an article about me in the newspaper, so when I came inSociety they knew who I was, and the clerk said, “You know, you had a hard time but things were bad here, too.” He said, “You couldn’t buy white shirts.” That was the worst thing that happened to him. But on the whole, on the whole, I think people were very understandinProject:g and were curious about my experience, and the GIs were as curiousGreatest about my experience as I was of theirs. I had no concept of the overwhelming experience of being in the Pacific.

In the spring of 1946 I took a class in creative writing,Historical and in that class there were twelve students, with three GIs who had been in Europe, and three GIs who had been in the Pacific. There were also some who had beenHistory at home, an d there was me. To listen to the creative writing that came out of that class was quite an amazing experience.

DB: They wrote about their experiences? Minnesota'sOral RD: I did, too, and it was a very strange thing. And the teacher said, “I have never had a class like this.” Minnesota

DB: Well, a lot of amazing experiences.

RD: Yes.

DB: How did you find the class work here? How did you find the academic environment at St. Olaf compared to Europe?

60 RD: Well, the vast difference between university studies in Europe and the universities here is that in Europe you’re pretty much on your own. You have a prescribed curriculum and it’s up to you whether you can cover that or not. Whether you can do it one year or two years or ten years or not at all. Whereas here everything is structured through courses. Specific courses. And you finish a course and you get a grade. Then that’s it. That system was difficult for me to adjust to. But it didn’t take very long. I mean it took a semester before I finally got the hang of it. The education system here is much more clearly structured. You move from one step to the next, and you don’t in Europe. In Europe, it’s entirely up to you. And that makes a European university teacher not as important in his relationship to the students as our teachers are here.

DB: And not too long after you were here, you became a teacher.

RD: Right. One year after.

DB: Wait a minute. Before we go there, you were supposed to be here for one year and then go back to Norway. II

RD: Right. GenerationPart DB: So something changed in the agreement.

RD: Something changed. About a week after I came to St. Olaf, I met mySociety wife. She was a sophomore from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.

DB: A Norwegian? Project: Greatest RD: Norwegian background. More so than I. No German genes in her background. And we started dating for about a year and a half and then got married in her senior year and when I was first teaching. But I started teaching in 1946. And Historicalin the year 1946-47 I was a full time teacher and a full time student. History DB: But getting married changed your status here and that allowed you to stay longer then. Is that correct?

RD: Well,Minnesota's when I startedOral teaching I got an extension on my student visa. That was handled through the immigration office in St. Paul. I didn’t get married until 1947. So we were here for a while as a dating couple. InMinnesota fact, when we got ma rried, Chris was still a senior. We were out in a faculty gathering once and my colleagues were very amused by the fact that there is a teacher and student, you know, and she is his wife. And one of the popular teachers at St. Olaf at the time was named Howard Hong, and as we were having this party somebody asked Chris, “And Chris, who is your favorite teacher?” And even without batting an eye she said, “Howard Hong.” Everybody expected . . . because she was in my class already. Everybody expected her to say my name. But she didn’t. She has never lived that down. Howard Hong is very amused by it.

DB: How did you find teaching here? Did you enjoy it?

61 RD: I found it very interesting. I had never prepared for a job of teaching. But I knew the subject so well. I taught Norwegian language, and of course I knew the Norwegian language. And, having studied many other foreign languages, I knew the system of teaching a language. So I had a good time doing that. However, I had a travel book, and after having taught for a year I wanted to do something else. I wanted to go somewhere else. I saw an article in the Christian Science Monitor that said that Ethiopia needs teachers with a Christian background. So I sent in my name to this and didn’t hear for a long while. But then in the summer of 1948 I got a telegram from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, and it said, “We have a job for you if you would like to have it. The job is director of His Imperial Majesty’s Institute of Music and Fine Art.” It was a huge title. And I wrote them back and said, by telegraph I said, “I’ll take it. Give me further instructions.” And this was in July of 1948.

DB: And there wasn’t a problem with your visa and your ability to come back?

RD: Well, that’s what I had to deal with, you know. Another long story. That’s right. But this was in July, and I didn’t hear anything until early in September. I got a telegramII again saying, “Why aren’t you coming?” They had decided to give me this job. I got in contact with the Ethiopian Embassy and I got a check and two tickets; one for Chris and one for me to go to Ethiopia. But again, that’s too long a story. GenerationPart

DB: No. It’s an important story. It must have been an amazing experience to go to Ethiopia. Society RD: It was an amazing experience. I got my . . . I had my Norwegian passport. There was no problem. I sent it to the Ethiopian Embassy. They quickly gave me a visa. We got this ticket with multiple stops on the way. And we flew from MinneapolisProject: to New York. We stayed with my cousin in New York for a few days andGreatest then went to Kennedy, which was a small airport back then, and flew on TWA to Paris. We stayed for three days in Paris and flew on to Geneva.

DB: This was your first time in an airplane? Historical

RD: First time in the airplane. AndHistory then spent thr ee days in Geneva. Flew to Rome. Spent three days in Rome. Flew to Cairo. And in Cairo I ran into the first trouble. My name. Dittmann. It caused suspicion in Cairo because at that time it was very anti-Semitic, of course.

DB: BecauseMinnesota's of the recentOral establishment of Israel.

RD: Right. And they thoughtMinnesota I was Jewish. So I wasn’t allowed into Cairo. Because I didn’t have a proper Egyptian visa. It was because they thought I was Jewish. So they put me up in a hotel on the outskirts of Cairo. A wonderful hotel, by the way. And we stayed there for a week. Finally after a week they decided we could go on to Ethiopia. The Egyptian government paid my bill and everything else and we flew to Addis Ababa. I came there to occupy this distinguished position and I learned when I came there that there was no such position. They had established the position in theory but they hadn’t gotten a budget through the Minister of Education. So Chris and I were assigned teaching jobs at the Heile Selassie Secondary School. It was the highest school in the country. That’s what happened. And I’m so sorry I didn’t have my visiting

62 card printed with the Director of His Imperial Majesty’s Institute of Music and Fine Art, you know. I should have had that.

DB: So how did you find teaching in Addis Ababa?

RD: Ethiopia? It was okay. I taught visual art and music and the students were fantastically devoted to learning. They’d come out from the jungles to this school that was funded completely by the government, and were very receptive. Chris taught English and arranged a library. She’s a librarian. We had a good time. But it so happened that she became pregnant while we were there. And that was a tough place to be pregnant. There were very few things available that a woman would want. So we decided that we were going to stay only for one year, and then about a month after our son was born we left Ethiopia and went back to Norway, back to America, and back to a job at St. Olaf.

DB: So he was born in Ethiopia? II RD: He was born in Ethiopia.

DB: That went all right? GenerationPart

RD: Yes. Society DB: They had an adequate hospital there.

RD: Right. Project: Greatest DB: And so you went back. After that, on the trip back to the United States you stopped in Norway. Historical RD: Right. History DB: And that was your first time back.

RD: That was the first time back since I left Norway. And my father was no longer living. He had died inMinnesota's 1946. Oral

DB: Your mother was livingMinnesota in the house that you built in the late 1930s.

RD: In the house. In the good house. Yes. I came back not only with myself, but with a wife and a child and the reception was wonderful.

DB: Did your wife speak Norwegian?

RD: Yes. Pretty well. Pretty well.

DB: Had she learned it growing up or had she learned it from you?

63 RD: She took Norwegian from me at St. Olaf. And of course she has been back in Norway so many times, so that now she is quite fluent.

DB: But at that time, 1948, she was able to really enjoy that experience because she could converse with people.

RD: Oh, tremendously.

DB: How long were you there?

RD: We were there from the 10th of July to the 10th of September. For two months. And had a very great time. We were very celebrated. This was rare in my hometown. Somebody who had come back from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. There were newspaper articles and all kind of things happening.

DB: Plus the experience being here and all of that. II

RD: Yes. Everything. GenerationPart DB: So you came back to St. Olaf?

RD: I came back to St. Olaf and continued teaching Norwegian. Society

DB: You had a job waiting for you when you got back? Project: RD: Yes. In both the Norwegian andGreatest German departments.

DB: Was it difficult to find housing here? This would have been 1949-50. Historical RD: No. Somebody had found us a place. A kind of a poor looking apartment where we spent about two years before we movedHistory into a better quarters. But it wasn’t difficult. There was no problem.

DB: I was referring to just the general situation after the war and everybody’s establishing families andMinnesota's so many youngOral families, people who had deferred the starting of families because of the war and now they’re all back and they’re all going to school and they’re trying to get jobs and . . . Minnesota

RD: We had married student’s barracks at St. Olaf, and there were lots of married students and married students even with children. It was a new experience for the college. We sort of fit in here without any problem at all.

DB: And so in 1952 you set up a travel agency in Northfield.

RD: Yes. It was very strange.

64 DB: Was this part of trying to feed that wanderlust again?

RD: It was partly that but it really was not my idea. A couple of students came to me and said, “We would like to go to Europe and don’t know how to do it. Could you help us out?” And I didn’t know much about it at all. But of course I said, “Sure, I’ll help you out.” And so I organized a tour of Europe for thirty-one students. One man, thirty women. I arranged for all the details from hotels to tickets to buses to everything, and I managed somehow to do this. As I said, I had no idea ahead of time. But ultimately everything was in good order. I used a large German company to do most of my work, called Tur Europa, from Frankfurt. We traveled for seventy-eight days. Eighteen days at sea from Montreal to South Hampton and back, and about sixty days in Europe. I charge these students $698 for the entire adventure and I earned fourteen dollars a person and felt guilty about it. But that was my first experience. My first experience in international travel, aside from my having been to Africa and Ethiopia.

DB: And it was a good experience? II RD: It was a very good experience, and thereafter I established an actual travel agency and I ran that for ten years as a part time activity, besides my teaching. GenerationPart DB: You said you set up a lot of the work through a company in Frankfurt, Germany.

RD: Yes. Society

DB: Was it difficult for you to work with the Germans? Project: RD: No. It wasn’t very difficult. TheyGreatest were very efficient. They had good experience in travel and they were very pleasant. And I visited with them personally many times. I had got some good friends there. Historical DB: So this started you leading international tours, which picked up more in 1954. History RD: Well, I did tours on my own, for my own income, for about ten years. Then in 1964 I was appointed Director of International Studies at St. Olaf.

DB: NowMinnesota's when you wereOral doing them before, just on your own, it wasn’t through the school. Did students get any kind of credit for it? Minnesota RD: No. They didn’t. Not initially.

DB: So it was just a trip that they were taking on their own.

RD: Right. My clients were students and teachers. But I was the one who took the risk, took the earnings if I earned anything and took the loss if I lost anything.

DB: But in 1964-65 it becomes affiliated with the school?

65 RD: No. I sold the agency in 1961. I went back to full time teaching. And it was probably my travel background that made the president of the college at the time think of me as someone who could be in charge of International Studies.

DB: So then it became a formal program of getting American students overseas for them to learn.

RD: Right. And St. Olaf is now the leading college in the nation in International Studies.

DB: You know, it is a problem in the United States. It’s such a big country that we’re often isolated and many people in the United States have no vision of the broader world.

RD: Oh, definitely.

DB: Did you find this to be a problem with a lot of the American students? II RD: In my first tour, the one in 1952, these thirty-one students had barely been out of the Midwest, you know, and all of a sudden they saw all of Europe from southern Italy to the north of Norway in one fell swoop. Sixty days. Of course, you Generationknow, all Parttours today are twelve days. Back then it was sixty days. We really saw things and experienced things and it opened their eyes, and of course their testimonies to me afterwards were glowing. Thank you for doing this for us. And the same spirit prevailed among students who do the programsSociety abroad now. Which are, of course, much more structured.

DB: Did these trips inspire any of the students intoProject: careers in diplomacy or international relations? Greatest

RD: Many. Many of them. And St. Olaf is the second in the nation when it comes to people going into the Peace Corps. Second nationally, competingHistorical with large universities.

DB: And the influence is largelyHistory through . . .?

RD: International Studies. Yes.

DB: InternationalMinnesota's StudiesOral classes which you were instrumental in setting up. Then in 1975 you became a professor of art history. Minnesota RD: Right.

DB: And so now you’re getting back into the art side of things.

RD: Correct.

DB: And did you lead art tours to Europe, or how did that manifest itself?

66 RD: Yes. I became Director of International Studies. I organized the semester programs abroad and interim programs abroad. I traveled with some of them and in other cases I did not travel with them. I just did the arrangements. And in the course of the ten years when I was in charge of that program we probably had four or five thousand students abroad. It developed to the extent that every semester we had about five hundred students away from campus. And the first programs I established were not in Norway, which might be natural. The first program I established was in the Far East, in Thailand and in China. And China at that time was in Taipei. China meant Taiwan in those early days. Now they are in Beijing.

DB: Did you have students going when China had first opened up?

RD: Immediately.

DB: That must have been an amazing experience.

RD: Yes. And I have not been there myself. I have been to Hong Kong. I’ve notII been into mainland China at all. And I guess I’m too old to get there.

DB: I don’t know. Do you continue to travel? GenerationPart

RD: I do continue to travel. Chris and I have been to Norway every year since 1952 and we’ll continue doing that as long as we can do it. Society

DB: And you just had the art center at St. Olaf named after you. Project: RD: Yes. Right. Greatest

DB: Do you want to describe that a little bit? Historical RD: Yes. I will describe how it came about. The president of the college at that time, Mark Edwards, called me up one day andHistory said, “I would like you to come for dinner. I have some friends who would like to have dinner with you. You and Chris. Can you come?” And so we arranged for a Thursday evening in the president’s dining room, and there came these four people that were my friends. Two students and their parents. I thought oh, this is very nice to meet withMinnesota's these peopleOral and have dinner with them. And then as we got to the dessert the president said, “Bill would like to say something to you.” And he stood up and said something in a very low voice and my hearingMinnesota was very bad. I didn’t hear what he was saying. So I remained silent when he was through speaking. And then he said, “Reidar, do you accept?” And I said, “Yes.” I had no idea what I was accepting.

DB: You guessed the right answer.

RD: Yes. And I knew that I should say yes. And then Mark, the president, said, “You may not have heard that right, but they said would you accept having your name on the new art building?” And these people were funding that building in its entirety. Twelve million dollars at that time.

67 DB: It’s a great honor.

RD: It was a wonderful gesture. And I’d said yes, but then the next day I had second thoughts about it and I went to the president and said, “I’m sorry. I don’t feel right about this. There are so many others who would be much more deserving than I.” I meant that very seriously. And he said, “Well, if so, they won’t give us the money.” [Laughter]

DB: So you’re stuck.

RD: Yes. I was stuck. Yes.

DB: And you’re the father of how many?

RD: Five.

DB: Grandfather of . . .? II

RD: Six. GenerationPart DB: And at Christmas you said you still maintain your Norwegian traditions here.

RD: We do. Yes. We do. Society

DB: Well, you’ve had an interesting life. Ups and downs. Project: RD: Ups and downs but generally veryGreatest positive. I feel very good about what has happened to me and I feel it was better than I deserve.

DB: Are there any other topics you want to talk about?Historical Anything significant in your life that might have been missed here? History RD: Well, we haven’t mentioned the wonders of my wife.

DB: Okay. Talk about your wife for a while. Minnesota'sOral RD: As I told you, I met her shortly after I came over. She has been a mainstay for me in all these years. We have beenMinnesota married for fifty-nine years. Approaching our sixtieth anniversary in a few months. And she has been a good mother, been a good professional. She was . . . she retired as an associate professor after having been in charge of the cataloging division of the St. Olaf Library. And has been a wonderful travel companion. Unfortunately presently she’s severely handicapped. Doesn’t move with any ease any place. But we still travel. We used to go to Arizona every year for about fifteen years but this is the first year we’re at home. That’s why the weather is so good.

DB: Well, thank you very much.

68 RD: Well, thank you for your patience with all of this.

DB: You’ve done a great job! Thank you.

RD: Thank you.

II

GenerationPart Society

GreatestProject:

Historical History

Minnesota'sOral Minnesota

69