I was sitting in our apartment in Glendale, but I might as well have been on another planet that day in 1993.
My grandmother, helping me with a sixth-grade report, vividly remembered the depredations of the Nazi occupation of Norway during World War II: the rationed bread filled with sawdust, the teachers missing from their classrooms, the tantrum she threw on a train to thwart the arrest of his older sister by a German officer. Decades after the war, these details came to her with fascinating clarity, even though she was barely a teenager when the occupation ended in May 1945.
I remember a lot about that interview with me. mor mor (Norwegian for “mother's mother”), which includes heartbreaking stories of resistance. But in 2024, with American democracy weakened and misinformation rampant, what haunts me most of what she said is the story of her family's utter disbelief when the Nazis invaded Norway in April 1940.
Your story makes me wonder how we would react if the United States fell into authoritarianism. Will we be able to recognize it?
Asking my grandmother about the time her country was attacked, I expected to hear stories of parachuting troops and explosions. Instead, what she told me was a story of confusion, denial, and, yes, hiking.
On the day of the invasion, he said, radio broadcasts reported the Nazi attack. Vidkun Quisling, leader of a fringe fascist party that had never won a seat in Norway's parliament, attempted a radio coup, but few took him seriously. The king and his government fled Oslo, the capital, without surrendering, but his hold on power was fragile.
All this developed quickly. My grandmother said that confusion spread in her family and in her community by the fjord. Then, she and her father climbed a mountain.
Their village, Stamnes, was a day's boat ride from Bergen, Norway's second largest city. From the top of the cliffs the fjord, They could look towards Bergen to see if anything was wrong. The view would be like standing on a hill in La Cañada Flintridge to see Long Beach.
What they saw, my grandmother said, shook them: planes were flying over Bergen, something extremely rare at that time. The town, a lifeline for rural western Norway, was under attack.
Even then, with the truth clearly out in the distance for them to see, they couldn't believe what was happening. Norway had maintained neutrality until then, but its people expected Britain to defend Nazi aggression if the time came. After all, the recently deceased Norwegian queen was the aunt of King George VI.
His disbelief did not overcome reality. Norway, a vibrant democracy that granted women's suffrage before the United States and even elected its king, would not be rescued from fascism until the end of World War II.
Quisling, Hitler's mini-me from Norway (he even called himself the “Forer“), would go on to govern an illegitimate puppet government. Although Norway did not suffer the same destruction as, say, Poland, the country's small Jewish population was arrested for mass murder. Concentration camps Openedand the civilians endured fierce Nazi reprisals for acts of resistance.
Of course, our situation in 2024 and Norway's situation in 1940 are very different, but those differences may not comfort us. We have no outside force that threatens to tear down our democracy. The Norwegians never elected Quisling or anyone from his party to power.
But what I find in common is the human bias towards normality and the refusal to recognize the threats that unfold against democracy (in my grandmother's case, from the top of a fjord; in ours today, from our screens.
Every time an elected leader bound by the Constitution exalts the attackers of January 6every time a lawyer argues in court that a president could order the assassination of a political rival, I find myself on that mountain in western Norway with my mor morwondering if what I see is really happening.
