In the footsteps of Jan Bålsrud
(Header image from the New York Times Magazine story linked below)
Before we went to Norway in July, I was looking for an audiobook to listen to on the long drive. I settled on We Die Alone, a book I had already read earlier this year, because it takes place in the area we would be visiting. As we drove, and listened, and drove some more, and listened some more (Tromsø is really far away), we ended up passing through Skibotn at the precise time the book’s action did! And an idea began percolating in my mind over the next few days of our trip, that on our way back to Finland, we could stop in Manndalen and hike to the cave where Jan Bålsrud hid from the Nazis for a few weeks in 1943.
Do you know the story of Jan Bålsrud? If not, there are a few ways to access the story of how he, a British-trained Norwegian spy, was pursued by the Nazis in the far north from March - June 1943, surviving only with the help of Norwegians in these remote villages.
Read We Die Alone. It is a fantastic book. I have now read it three times, including twice just this year. And it kept our entire family spellbound in the car as we listened to the audiobook.
Watch The 12th Man, a Norwegian-made movie from 2017. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is in it, speaking German! It would probably be rated R in the US but the greusome moments that make it so are clearly telegraphed; you could close your eyes in those parts and it would be PG-13, no problem.
Watch Ni Liv, a Norwegian-made movie from 1957. It’s on YouTube with English subtitles. It’s definitely a product of its time but my kids watched the whole thing!
Read Defiant Courage (none of my libraries have this book so I haven’t been able to get my hands on a copy!).
Read the Wikipedia article.
As for being in Norway, this site was helpful in determining which Jan Bålsrud sites were the closest to where we were going to be.
We finished the We Die Alone audiobook just minutes before pulling into the trailhead area up the valley from Manndalen. And even without the excitement of knowing that we were hiking on the same trails the villagers had when they helped Jan survive in the cave, hiding from the Nazis, it was simply a gorgeous hike. It was about 11km round trip and it took us around three hours.
Jan requested to be buried in the village cemetery, which we visited on our way out of town.
Both Jan and our family went through Kilpisjärvi, Finland on our way to our eventual destinations: Jan to neutral Sweden in 1943 and the Palmers on our looooooong drive back to Turku in 2020.
