Norwegian fighters who risked all to resist a murderous tyranny

Norway: As the main players gather in Moscow to mark the 60th anniversary of VE Day, Norway - a lesser player - also remembers…

Norway: As the main players gather in Moscow to mark the 60th anniversary of VE Day, Norway - a lesser player - also remembers the consequences of Nazi occupation, as Audrey Andersen reports from Oslo.

The tiny pair of brown leather shoes in the Norwegian Resistance Museum is heart-wrenchingly poignant. They look like the first shoes of a baby who has just taken its first faltering steps.

It is likely too that they were also the last shoes worn.

Positioned incongruously near the shoes lies another artefact; a tin of cyanide with instructions for the elimination of "Vermin" - the codename the Nazis used for Jews.

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Monday will mark the 60th anniversary of VE Day, the end of the second World War in Europe. For Norway, the horror began on the morning of April 9th, 1940, when German troops invaded, thus sealing the fate of Norwegian Jewry.

Rosa's mother was a young girl when she was sent to Auschwitz. She believes her youth and good health gave her an advantage. Her family were not so lucky, all perished in the camps. She survived the Holocaust, returning after the war to Norway where Rosa was born some years later.

She has never forgotten her experiences there and, as she gets older, the need to ensure that it is never forgotten becomes more important.

Rosa herself wonders if in time people will forget. "I find it difficult to accept that some people believe that this was all a well-constructed Jewish fabrication," she says.

Some years ago, a young friend of the family asked for some assistance for a history assignment. He had been asked to submit a story about Norway's role in the second World War.

He asked Rosa's mother if he could record and write her story. She readily agreed.

Erik wrote the account of the old lady's life in a Nazi concentration camp. Her national identity was as important as her religion.

She wanted him to promise that he would stress that she was a Norwegian citizen and a Jew, as both her national identity and her religion were important to her.

When Erik submitted his essay, it was dismissed as a work of fantasy. The teacher, a history teacher, did not believe it happened. But it did - half of the Norwegian Jewish population died under Nazi occupation.

Norwegian children of Jewish parentage, 72 in total - ranging in age from two months to 16 years - went straight to the gas chambers with other children from all over Europe. In October 1942, an act was passed permitting the confiscation of all Jewish property in Norway.

That month the Norwegian Nazi Party, headed by Quisling, sought the arrest of all male Jews over the age of 15 years.

One month later, women and children were herded together and in four transports, 769 Jews were deported. Of these only 29 survived, with 21 committing suicide in Norway itself.

In early winter 1942, 900 Jews had escaped to Sweden with the help of Norwegian resistance.

And if you visit the Norwegian Resistance Museum you will see plenty of evidence of both Jewish and non-Jewish Norwegian suffering under the Nazis. You will see the male and female pyjama-type clothing worn by the inmates of Sachsenhausen and Ravensbruck. You will see the torture instruments and pictures of the skeletal survivors when liberated.

The heroic efforts of the "grenselos", the Norwegian border pilots, are a testimony to the bravery of Norwegians who risked their lives to escort both Jews and non-Jews over the border to neutral Sweden.

Nine thousand Norwegians were held in German concentration camps. Just outside Oslo lies the concentration camp of Grini - the largest in Norway.

By the end of the war, some 25,000 people were held here. Some 50,000 Norwegians were arrested, of which 9,000 were sent to concentration camps in Germany, France, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

For Rosa it is not about revenge. It is about the past informing the future.

The exact sentiment is found in the final lines of the poem by Norwegian Freda Isaksen.

"We shall remember. And make the world to be full of loveliness again."