Antifascist resistance: Bernt H. Lund: prisoner number 76 327

Farewell in Oslo two years ago: “We remain siblings,” said Inger. “Siblings forever!” An evening with neighbors and friends came to an end, with good food and German guests. And because everyone knew that there wouldn’t be many more such encounters, Inger and Bernt hugged each other even more warmly. The story of the two cannot be told so easily…

A political family

Inger, now over 80, used to work as an engineer in a power plant in the GDR. She is the daughter of the German communists Edith Raphael and Hans Holm, who fled the Nazis to Norway. Bernt Henrik Lund, 18 years older than him, is – according to Wikipedia – a retired Norwegian civil servant, diplomat and politician from the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. He held leading administrative positions in the Oslo city administration and was also active in foreign affairs, such as Norway’s first ambassador to Namibia. Lund is a recipient of the Swedish Order of the North Star and the Order of the British Empire. In 2018 he was elected President of the International Sachsenhausen Committee.

While he was imprisoned in the Grini concentration camp near Oslo as a 17-year-old, his mother Sigrid Helliesen Lund helped hide a Jewish baby – Inger – from the German occupiers. Ms. Lund took over guardianship until Inger’s father, who, like Bernt Lund, survived the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was able to take his daughter back after the war. Their fate has already been reported in this newspaper.

As part of a Rosa Luxemburg Foundation project, we traveled to Oslo in May 2022, first to the district that bears the name “Fatherland” and where Inger’s mother was arrested by the Gestapo on Christmas Eve 1942. Today, in front of the house at Lakkegata 17, a half-hour walk from the harbor, a “stumbling block” commemorates the Jewish communist who was murdered in Auschwitz. In retrospect, she appeared in the SED party files as a “Trotskyist,” which was probably the reason why Edith Raphael was not mentioned with a single syllable by the GDR historians of communist historiography.

But back to Bernt Lund: On our trip to Oslo, we took the S-Bahn to the Vinderen district from the “Fatherland”, which has nothing to do with home but goes back to the Dutch Waterland, i.e. Wattland. Here at Tuengen allé 9, Inger’s father, the KPD co-founder and publisher Hans Holm, worked as a gardener for some time after his arrival in Norway – in the house of Diderich Lund and his wife Sigrid. Today she is highly honored in Israel as “Righteous Among the Nations” for saving many Jewish people, including the girls and boys from a Jewish children’s home.

Resistance, imprisonment and survival

For a long time, young Bernt Lund knew nothing about his mother’s resistance. In her autobiography she wrote: “I was happy to keep Bernt out of our illegal employment for as long as possible.” Bernt, in turn, considered his parents to be cowards. And because he didn’t want to stand idly by with the German occupation, the 17-year-old distributed leaflets and illegal newspapers. One morning in May 1942, German police broke into the family home on Tuengen-Allee. But not to arrest the mother, the father had already been arrested and released once – the officers took away the son, who had “only” distributed leaflets.

Bernt Lund was first sent to the large Oslo prison in the Grønland district, where he spent seventeen days in solitary confinement. He was severely mistreated during interrogations. Regardless of his youth, they beat the name of a comrade out of him. The memory of it has weighed on him ever since. In general, as he said, Lund always had the feeling that he had done too little in the resistance before his arrest. Especially since his retirement, Lund has made it his mission to educate people about what fascism and dictatorship mean. He gave lectures to young people for many years.

Lund told them how he first ended up in the Grini concentration camp near Oslo. There he was deployed in an external camp and had to dig up and chop up tree roots. What he remembers most, however, was the constant hunger, as he said many years later. His situation improved with work in the clothing store, where he maintained contact with the resistance movement. One night in October 1943 he was woken up and called into the clothing room to prepare the clothes for four prisoners. One of them was Christian Fredrik Fasting Aall, an agent trained in England and returned to Norway who wanted to set up a resistance group. »I knew immediately that he and the other three would be executed. Why else would the SS ask for their clothes in the middle of the night?” Bernt Lund shook hands with everyone as he said goodbye. He was the last person to see these people alive.

In March 1944, 33 names were called at a morning roll call in Grini, one of which was Bernt Lund, who found himself on transport to Germany three days later. In his lectures he always remembered his prisoner number, 76 327: »It was a shock to come to Sachsenhausen. Everything was taken away from us and we were shaved bald. We were shouted at, ordered around and insulted. The treatment we received was degrading and, above all, psychologically stressful.”

The good news back then: Among the prisoners in the Sachsenhausen main camp, young Bernt Lund met a friend of his family, the German Hans Holm, the very person whose little daughter Lund’s mother was looking after in Oslo. Holm, arrested in Norway in January 1943, was assigned to the Scandinavians’ block, where prisoners were allowed to receive mail and packages. That’s how he found out that Inger was alive and healthy. And of course Holm looked after Sigrid Helliesen Lund’s son. However, even he could not prevent his ward from being sent to an external commando under the worst possible conditions.

Through Holm’s intervention, the young Lund soon became the third assistant to the foreman prisoner Kurt Müller, a position that was not even planned. What should not be left out about Kurt Müller’s personality is that after the war he was deputy chairman of the KPD in West Germany and a member of the Bundestag who was lured to East Berlin in 1950 and arrested after a conversation with Ulbricht. Kurt Müller, survivor of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a Soviet military tribunal in 1953 for “terror, espionage, sabotage, group formation and terrorist activity.” He was only released in 1955.

In his memoirs, Bernt Lund recounts a conversation with Holm at the end of January 1945. »He had turned 50 at the beginning of the month, and now my mother had sent him a congratulatory letter that he wanted to show us because he didn’t really understand what she said. In the letter she wrote that she would prepare a kindergarten in southern Sweden for children like Titen, Bonne and Pelle. It was immediately clear to Lund that the mother was referring to him. Titen was his nickname. »Daycare? In Sweden? This can mean nothing other than a reception center for prisoners. Half an hour later everyone in the Norwegian barracks knew it. “I’ve never seen news spread so quickly!” The rescue operation of the White Buses, which was announced here, is a story in itself. Starting in March 1945, around 15,000 Norwegian and Danish prisoners were brought to safety in Sweden in white-painted vehicles marked with Red Cross signs. The vice president of the Swedish Red Cross, Folke Bernadotte, personally negotiated their rescue with the “Reichsführer der SS” Heinrich Himmler. This action was part of further efforts by the Germans to achieve a separate peace with the Western Allies.

Especially since his retirement, Lund has made it his mission to educate people about what fascism and dictatorship mean.

Hans Holm was released along with the Scandinavian prisoners, including Bernt Lund, but only after a long forced march that became a death march for many. After arriving in Norway, Holm immediately looked for his daughter, who was not yet three years old at the time. She survived the war and occupation in a Protestant children’s home in Oslo. It was also at this time that Inger’s first encounter with Bernt Lund, with whom she had a sisterly bond for a while thanks to his mother’s courageous actions. The memory of it soon disappeared. The connection between the two was later re-established.

Bernt Lund now lives in a nursing home, as his daughter Tanja reported in an email. There he has a very nice German supervisor who comes from Oranienburg. “She speaks German to him and he understands it well.” Family and friends celebrated his 100th birthday on Wednesday with their father all day.