Dear audience!
I am honored to be invited to IHRS for the 2nd time. First time was in 2022 to present my, by then unpublished, book Sviket, showing the betrayal of the Norwegian Government in exile in London during WWII against the Norwegian Jews – my first presentation of that book. (Upper right poster illustration)
Today my poster presentation is about my parents’ testimonies and experiences through their correspondence and diaries, almost day by day from April 1943 to January 1947. They married 85 years ago – anniversary in 4 days - and escaped from Oslo to Stockholm well before the Donau transportation in November 1942. But they were divided when my father, Willy Rubinstein, ventured on from Sweden to Britain to join the Norwegian forces there – 18 days before I was born, and very much against my mother Lillemor’s will and wish.
In nearly 200 letters and telegrams they express their conflicting feelings, tell about their lives, thoughts and experiences, longings, hopes and fears for the future after victory, in a war that just seems to be going on for ever. Always with the looming background of Holocaust and the destiny of family members in Nazi captivity. The letters, censored by Norwegian, British and Swedish examiners, often tell half trues and use code names. But Lillemor’s 5 diaries are much more straight forward and hide nothing. (Left hand poster illustrations)
Numerous themes and stories are told. F.i. a random meeting that damaged and nearly destroyed the relationship between Lillemor and Willy (lower right poster picture):
Willy enrolled as infantry soldier 3112 in The Norwegian Army’s Scotland Brigade, Mountain Platoon no. 3, classified with “B” fighting ability, stationed in St. Andrews near Dundee. But he felt he could do much better service in his capacity as a lawyer and auditor. So, he took classes held by Cambridge University to get a better suited military job. He travelled to London for classes and tests.
Wind back exactly 81 years today to the 12th of March 1945. Willy takes the night train from London to Edinburgh and shares a compartment with three others. One of them is “a Scottish school head master” who invites him to his home in Dundee. As it turns out, they have much to talk about. A week later Willy tells Lillemor that he has been recruited to a new activity, with promotion and a substantial rise in salary. But he does not mention the nature of his new duty. He is sent to a special course in London, and just 2 weeks before Germany surrenders, he proudly tells Lillemor that he was best in class and already had been promoted.
The Scottish school head master was Colonel Lieutenant Robert Chew, who arrived in Oslo by air on the 8th of May 1945 and by train in Bergen – the capital city of West Norway next day with the task of getting a surrender signature from General de Boer and taking over Western Norway from the Germans. Willy followed on board DS Bergensfjord, a cruise liner converted to troop transporter, 3 weeks later. His task, which he had been prepared for through his courses in England, was to collect and keep order of German military equipment in Norway. That would take several months.
Lillemor reacted with fury. She travelled by train from Stockholm to Bergen to tell Willy that the war was over and that his duty now was with her and their son. She considered his behavior a betrayal, and said that there would be no reunion at the end of his duty. She had other plans and started a love affair in Stockholm. Willy reacted with sorrow, despair and regret, and his letters to her the next months are heartbreaking. But the military assignment with Colonel Lieutenant Robert Chew was unbreakable.
Finally, Willy convinced Lillemor to return to him after all, and he came by air to Stockholm in October 1945 where they were photographed at Pan Studio together with me. I was probably the main reason why Lillemor decided to take Willy back. Have a look at the center poster illustration. We are all smiling, but only my smile is genuine, with a little doubt in the expression. I thought that the man in the picture was an uncle. Lillemor is still angry and Willy fearful. They had mixed feelings.
Lillemor gave a booklet to her friend full of goodbye poems, had an abortion and was plagued with serious mental stress, but we were finally reunited in Oslo in December 1945.
By then, Willy had successfully accounted for all German military equipment in Western Norway from tanks and guns to parachutes and compasses. Robert Chew married a Norwegian lady and returned to his job as head master at the famous elite boarding school in Gordonstoun near Dundee.
You can copy this QR code or open sviket.no to read more about Gordonstoun’s Jewish and royal connections. Here you also find more about Sviket – The Betrayal, as well as much of this poster talk.
The letters, telegrams and diaries, plus additional letters and documents, offer a unique contemporary, authentic documentation of lives divided in the shadow of Holocaust, as experienced by Jewish, Norwegian refugees in wartime Sweden and UK - written in real time, from different perspectives by different personalities.
I used all this documentation to draw a background on a personal level in the book Sviket. Presently, I edit the letters and diaries and, as in the Robert Chew story, select and put bits and pieces together and recompose them into a contemporary testimony of experiences and 1st generation narratives. This had hardly been possible without the 177 letters digitalized by Georg Broch at the HL Center in Oslo. Thank you, Georg!
Thank you all for listening, I will be here for questions and discussions. Special thanks to my wife Mirjam and my brother Jan Benjamin who always support me, also here today! Thank you, I love you!