New book ‘Norway’s War’ explores Cambridge woman’s role in the Norwegian resistance

A new book by award-winning British-Norwegian author Robert Ferguson explores the Nazi occupation of Norway during the Second World War – and tells the little-known story of a Cambridge woman’s involvement in the country’s underground resistance.

Titled Norway’s War, this exhaustively-researched tome details the five-year occupation and its judicial aftermath, and reveals fascinating personal accounts from ordinary people caught up in it.

These include a 37-year-old Cambridge woman called Myrtle Wright (1903-1991), who travelled to Norway in April 1940 on her way to Denmark, but was delayed by bad weather.

Three days later, the Nazis invaded Norway and, despite many legal attempts to leave, she was trapped in the country.

Robert, speaking to the Cambridge Independent from his cabin in the Norwegian mountains, takes up the story: “I don’t really follow the British angle [in my book] all that much,” he says, “although I do write at some length about Myrtle Wright, a woman from Cambridge who found herself stranded in in Norway by accident on 9 April, the night of the German invasion.”

Myrtle was a member of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and was on her way to Copenhagen with a suitcase packed for just for two weeks.

She ended up staying four years and became part of a resistance group that included a 48-year-old mother-of-two (including a young boy with Down syndrome), Sigrid Helliesen Lund.

On two occasions, they received coded messages concerning the imminent arrest of Norwegian Jews and were able to find safe havens for many of them until they could be smuggled over into Sweden.

Myrtle, who had been a student at The Perse – she went on to study natural sciences at Newnham College – eventually managed to escape to Sweden with Sigrid Helliesen Lund on 10 February, 1944 in the middle of the night, using the same snowy forest route that they had helped many Jews through.

She was later awarded King Haakon VII’s Freedom Cross for her outstanding services to the country.

“I mention her really because of her diary,” explains Robert, “people don’t know about it, it hasn’t been used by other historians – even Norwegian historians.

“And it’s particularly interesting because of the insight it gives us into the day-by-day pressures and hardships of living in an occupied country.

“And at the end of the war, she gave the diary to the Resistance Museum in Oslo. It’s a fascinating human document.”

Robert, a writer, translator and radio dramatist, is the author of numerous books, including Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North, The Vikings: A History, Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography, and Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, which was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Best Biography Award and won the University of London JG Robertson Award.

His translation of Lars Mytting’s Norwegian Wood won Non-Fiction Book of the Year in 2016.

Born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, near Stoke-on-Trent, to Scottish parents in 1948, Robert lived in Lytham St Annes, near Blackpool, from the age of 11 to 17.

He emigrated to Norway in 1983, married a Norwegian woman, and has made his home there ever since.

“I think in Norway there have been 2,000 books published on every conceivable aspect of the war and the occupation since 1945,” notes Robert.

“And in recent years there has been a spate of films about war heroes in Norway, many of them available on the streaming services.

“So in my book, I wanted to concentrate on the non-violent opposition, because the Nazis, particularly through the agency of Quisling and other Norwegian Nazis who were given the superficial reigns of government from 1942 onwards, really did try to impose a National Socialist revolution on the Norwegian people, in the schools, in the churches…

“They tried to turn it into a Nazi country and the teachers, the priests and the parents refused – and they actually won out.

“None of the teachers would agree to teach the new curriculum, none of the priests would agree to change what they preached from the pulpit, and the parents launched massive campaigns of letter-writing to protest against the attempt to create what was, in effect, a Norwegian version of the Hitler Youth Movement in Germany.

“There was just so much opposition to the proposed revolution that in the end the Norwegian Nazis had to abandon the attempt.

“I do cover some of the more dramatic episodes of violence and liquidations and sabotage and so on, but the population of Norway at the beginning of the war was just under two million.

“At no time were there ever less than 370,000 German military personnel in Norway, and under the circumstances there was no way a military resistance could have thrown them out.

“The fate of the Norwegians was completely dependent on what went on in the larger theatre of war, in Japan, North Africa, in the Pacific, in the East, in mainland Europe and Italy.

“But the unique thing about the Norwegian experience was this resistance to this attempt to turn it into a National Socialist society.

“So in some ways, I felt that that was the focus of my book, that these people are not often written about.”

Norway’s War, published by Head of Zeus, is available now. For more on Robert, go to robertferguson.org.