Irene Levin turned the hundreds of notes her mother left behind after her death into a book chronicling the story of Norwegian Jews during the Holocaust.
Published in Haaretz: https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/2025-04-30/ty-article-magazine/.premium/in-norway-we-have-yet-to-confront-the-full-meaning-of-the-holocaust/00000196-804b-dc27-a3df-f2fbf3d80000
When Irene Levin's mother was 96, she left her apartment in Oslo and moved into a Jewish old age home. Levin and her two children wanted her mother's – and their grandmother's – new home to feel like a miniature version of the elegant, meticulously arranged apartment she had lived in for decades. To do so, they moved in the gilded-upholstered furniture, the paintings, the silverware, and the mirrors her mother never passed without briefly checking her reflection. As part of the process, they also cleaned and organized the apartment.
It took Levin more than five years to understand the significance of what she found during that process. "There were notes everywhere," she told Haaretz in an interview. "Some were hidden in piles of newspapers, other were tucked away in drawers, on shelves, and in cupboards. Some had only one or two sentences, others were full pages written in my mother's handwriting. Although they weren't dated, her handwriting showed they spanned different time periods – the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
"When I first found the notes, I didn't read them. They became just one more thing I would get to when I had time. For five years, they stayed enclosed in an envelope." Levin's mother, Fanny Raskow, died in 2013 at the age of 101. "After she passed away, and after I retired, I started reading the notes," Levin recalls. "Mostly the notes were about World War II, but also about her upbringing before the war in a family that had escaped to what is now Lithuania. There were many unfinished sentences, especially those dealing with the arrest and deportation of her father, my grandfather. It's unclear who the notes were meant for. Maybe she wrote for herself, as a way of venting, or perhaps she hoped I would eventually find them. But she never mentioned them".
Levin says the notes revealed the dilemmas and choices her mother faced. "My mother blamed herself all her life for not being able to save her father," she says. "It haunted her constantly, until the end of her life. In all my upbringing there was a silence, and the war was never discussed openly. If it came up, it was always indirectly or through broken, incomplete sentences." At a certain point, Levin realized that her mother's story was also the story of other Norwegian Jews. The result was her book, ("Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust. Mor, jeg og tausheten," Gyldendal, 2020, literally translated as "We Didn't Talk About the Holocaust: Mother, I, and the Silence"). The English version, titled "Everyday Silence and the Holocaust", was published by Routledge last year.
"My mother was trapped in a history that had been imposed on her, and one that for decades remained almost unspoken in Norwegian society," Levin says. "When I began researching in the National Archives of Norway in Oslo, I tried to see whether other Jewish families' stories were similar to that of my mother. I started asking new questions about my personal history and discovered experiences and events that had always been there, just not talked about.
"As a child, I simply acted on behaviors that seemed normal. As an adult – and as a professional – I began questioning my own story. Are the gaps in the stories significant? The fact that the life of our tiny nuclear family was defined by specific, historical events was something I simply knew. Just as one learns one's mother tongue intuitively, I learned about 'the war'. I lived my whole life in a community of World War II survivors, yet I still didn't really know much, despite believing I knew the whole story."
'What Happened to Our Jews?'
The story of Irene Levin is, to a great extent, the story of an entire generation of Norwegian Jews. Her grandparents' families emigrated to Norway around 1905 from Lithuania, fleeing poverty, hard conditions, and persecution. Levin explains that this migration differed from that of other Scandinavian countries. While Denmark and Sweden received "Ost-Juden" – Jews from Central Europe – there were already established Jewish communities in those countries. Some were prominent figures in society and openly identified as Jews. In Norway, by contrast, Jews were only permitted to enter starting in the mid-19th century. They were few in number, poor, and mostly uneducated.
Less than 40 years after her grandparents arrived in Norway, they and their children had to flee. This time, it was due to the German occupation during World War II, and their destination was Sweden, the neutral and thus safe neighboring country to the east. Levin's parents were among hundreds of Jews who left Norway as the Nazi persecution escalated, peaking in the fall of 1942 when hundreds of Norwegian Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
Levin's parents received help from a neighboring family, and their escape was aided by friends and members of the resistance movement, who hid them from the Gestapo and the Norwegian police in various locations. Their journey took 23 days. Levin's mother was pregnant during the escape, and she gave birth to Irene, her first and only child, in the Swedish town of Norrköping, where the family stayed until the war ended.
After the war, Levin, her mother, and father returned to Norway and began rebuilding their lives. She was less than two and a half years old and doesn't remember Liberation Day, but it's clear to her that even then, silence began to play a significant role. "We didn't talk about the war," she recalls. "The fact that the family went through a disaster was always present, but it wasn't spoken about. In the 1950s, when I was ten, we could be sitting with guests around the dinner table, and someone might suddenly say something like, 'It was Norwegian police who made the arrests, not the Germans.' And someone would reply, 'It doesn't matter, we're not getting them back either way.' Then the conversation would switch to the previous topic, and no one would ask, 'What do you mean?' Everyone knew what it meant, they just didn't talk about it for decades."
Did the silence begin right at the end of the war?
"You can tell from the Norwegian press how knowledge about what had happened slowly evolved. The free press resumed operations as early as May 14, 1945. On the second day, the country's largest newspaper, Aftenposten, asked, 'What happened to our Jews?' The article reported, 'There is reason to fear that many Norwegian Jews have died,' and quickly added that no confirmation had been received. In the weeks that followed, reports ended with phrases like, 'There is no reason to lose hope.' On May 17, the same newspaper reported, 'We have 750 Jews in Germany. So far, we've heard from only nine or ten.' Slowly, the news worsened, and by May 23, it was reported that the Jews had been taken to 'the notorious concentration camp Auschwitz.'
"After a while, the topic was no longer written about. It resurfaced in the trials of Norwegians who had collaborated with the Nazis, and in the court case of the Norwegian traitor Vidkun Quisling [a Nazi collaborator who headed the government of Norway during the country's occupation by Nazi Germany] where two survivors testified. One of them, the later well-known psychiatrist Leo Eitinger, told of Jews being gassed. When asked by the judge if Norwegian Jews were treated in the same way, he answered 'Yes, I swear to God.'"
The outcome of the war was catastrophic for Levin's family. Thirty-two members of her extended family, including her maternal grandfather, were murdered in Auschwitz. Her grandfather was deported along with hundreds of other Norwegians –men, women, and children – on November 26, 1942. Levin's mother tried to spare him by putting him in a hospital but he was taken from there, arrested and, the next day, loaded onto the ship SS Donau. After four days in its cargo hold, he and the others arrived in Stettin, where they were crammed into cattle cars. On December 1, they reached Auschwitz-Birkenau. Levin's grandfather's exact fate remains unknown. He was one of an endless number of victims who didn't survive and never returned to Norway.
The facts about World War II in Norway and the fate of its Jews are well-known. On the eve of the war, Norway had around 2,800,000 inhabitants, of whom about 2,400 were Jews, including around 500 from other nationalities. During World War I, Norway had remained neutral, and hoped to maintain neutrality again during World War II. But events took a different turn. A Norwegian fascist party, Nasjonal Samling (The National Union), founded in 1933 by officer and politician Vidkun Quisling, offered the Nazis cooperation in taking over the country. Germany invaded Norway and Denmark on April 9, 1940, in Operation Weserübung. Denmark surrendered within hours, while battles in Norway lasted around two months before the German victory, achieved after the Allied forces retreated and Narvik – a strategic port used for shipping iron ore from Sweden – was captured.
As the Germans occupied the country, the Norwegian king and government fled and formed a government-in-exile in London. Civilian rule in Norway was overtaken by Nazi official Josef Terboven, appointed Reichskommissar by Hitler. Terboven governed through a pro-German puppet government headed by Quisling. The Norwegian parliament was dissolved, all parties banned except Quisling's, and the judiciary was subordinated to German control.
Persecution of the Jews began with sporadic decrees early in the occupation. In 1941, arrests were made, property confiscated, and some Jews were executed on false charges. In 1942, mass arrests of hundreds of Jews were carried out, most of whom, including Levin's grandfather, were transported on the SS Donau to Auschwitz. Another ship, the MS Gotenland, transported 158 more Jews to the same destination in February 1943. In total, 772 Norwegian Jews were arrested or deported. The oldest among them 80, the youngest an 8-week-old baby. Fewer than 40 came back. Those who survived the war had mostly escaped to neutral Sweden or Britain.
The facts were known for decades, but their meaning has been the subject of public debate – one that Irene Levin, after publishing her book, is now central to. Levin is a professor emeritus of social sciences at Oslo Metropolitan University. Her work started in the area of family studies with emphasis on new family forms and gender studies. In recent years, she has moved her area of research into history and Holocaust studies and has been closely connected to the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies, including working with surveys on antisemitism. She has worked with Soviet Jewry and been active in applying for Norwegian non-Jews receiving the Righteous Among the Nations award, granted by Yad Vashem.
Her recent book adds to numerous other publications she's written or edited, covering topics from social sciences to remembrance, and the Holocaust in Norway.
Her new book generated considerable attention in Norway. Positive reviews appeared in major newspapers; she was interviewed by media and gave lectures across the country for over a year. Headlines focused on themes like "The Holocaust That Always Sat Within the Walls" or "The Mother Who Dealt with Trauma Through Silence." Critics noted that Levin "presents her family's history as a gateway to understanding the Jewish tragedy in Norway," "gives us a micro-history that opens wounds – with painful, terrifying details," and "breaks the silence, telling dramatic stories of fate."
Is the silence of the survivors and Norwegian society similar to that of survivors in other countries, or does it have unique characteristics?
"The phenomenon of silence is not unique, but circumstances vary. What's special about Norway is that it had a small number of Jews and geographically, with the long border with Sweden and the long coastline to England, one would think that it would be possible to hide more".
"Moreover, Norwegian Jews loved Norway. They learned the language and embraced the culture; they embraced the Norwegian love of nature and even changed their surnames to make them easier for their neighbors to pronounce. That's why what happened shocked them. They told themselves that they were arrested by the Gestapo – when, in fact, it was the Norwegian police.
"My mother always said: 'It took such a long time until we really understood, Irene.' Those who survived and returned weren't like the other Norwegians coming back after the war – the resistance fighters or political exiles. They weren't heroes. They won the war. The Jews had not won the war. They were deported or fled because of who they were, not what they did – and that came with a sense of shame. They asked themselves, 'What kind of Norwegians are we now?'"
Levin explains that other elements were involved. Some blamed themselves for failing to save relatives. They were grief-stricken, and many had to face the painful, often unsuccessful process of reclaiming seized property. Homes and businesses had been confiscated or auctioned off. Only in the 1990s, following a media campaign and the creation of a restitution committee, did Norwegian society begin to seriously reckon with the Holocaust. Survivors received compensation, and the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies was established.
"Until the 1990s, the story of the Jews was not integrated into the national historical narrative," Levin says. "It's not that people didn't know what happened – there were books and survivor testimonies – but Jews were not part of the main story. The Holocaust in Norway was like an appendix to Norwegian history, not part of the official narrative."
So, if the Holocaust wasn't part of Norway's war story, would it be accurate to say that Norway didn't take responsibility for what happened to its Jews?
"In three major historical books that shaped the narrative and were published in 1950, the extermination of the Jews was described merely as a 'detail'. Later, in the 1980s, six volumes titled 'Norway at War' asked: What happened to the Jews? The answer is mostly covered in the third volume, spanning 18 pages with photos. In the final section, the question is raised – could more have been done to help the Jews? could they have been warned about what deportation meant? the answer the book gives is that Jews in all occupied countries and even in the free world underestimated the cruelty of the SS. That is, responsibility was ultimately shifted to the Jews themselves – because they didn't resist arrest.
"When I first read these, I thought that they did the same as my mother, blaming herself for her father's arrest, as did society at large. Both the minority and the majority put the responsibility on the Jews. But I realized that when my mother blamed herself, she was taking the burden on herself, bearing the responsibility – as a Jewish woman and a daughter. When the author, as a representative of society, blamed the Jews, it was the opposite: it was the removal of responsibility."
Do you think this perspective still echoes in Norway in 2025, amid rising antisemitism and claims that Norwegian society is abandoning its Jews?
"For the Jews in Norway [the community numbers approximately 1,500 people], October 7 is an echo from the war, while knowing that it was not the same and that the Holocaust is unique. But Norwegian society at large did not hear the same echo. They only heard the voice from Hamas and very quickly defined the attack as a continuity of occupation.
"It was a shock that the empathy that the Jews in Norway had earned due their history during the war, suddenly disappeared. I never thought that during my lifetime, I would experience a rise of antisemitism. When researching the Holocaust and antisemitism, I was doing it as something belonging to the past to ensure it would not happen again. Suddenly, the Jewish state was attacked and its legitimacy was at stake. The Jewish voice has lost its legitimacy.
"My grandmother would always tell me: 'Die Juden sind schuldig' – the Jews are to blame, always. I thought that was relevant to the shtetl, not my everyday life. There is a shift in the perception of responsibility and legitimacy – the focus has changed, and it is no longer in our favor. I demonstrated on Women's Day and my fellow feminists didn't allow us to participate! They questioned whether there were even sexual assaults on October 7; and if they did accept that they happened, they minimized their significance, treating it as something that 'naturally' happens in every war.
"In my research on silence, an important factor is the interaction between the individual and society. After World War II, it was not only the Jews who were silent. The society at large was silent, too, but for different reasons. The space the minority has is shaped by the majority. It took Norwegian society 50 years before it recognized its responsibility in the atrocities. In the current situation, the Jewish voice has little legitimacy and the connection with society at large is of distrust. But can we Jews wait for the society to show us such a space? We have to take it. In that sense, it's like a revolution."
At the end of the interview, Levin returns to the topic of silence, which she sees as the common thread between the biographical and the historical. It's a silence shared by many survivors of the war, but Levin suggests that it is an even broader phenomenon.
"If you had asked me about the Holocaust while I was growing up – if you had asked me whether I knew about the war and what happened to the Jews – I would have said yes," she says. "But today I know that I didn't know. I didn't have the details; I didn't know what really happened. What I had was a sense that a catastrophe had occurred, and that it had happened to the Jews. Nothing more.
"And maybe that's similar to other disasters, like what happened on October 7. Even though information spreads much faster today, the feeling is similar. We know a disaster occurred, we think we understand it, but as time passes, we realize in hindsight that we didn't know everything, that we didn't grasp the scope, and that we still haven't dealt with all the implications."
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