Epic flight to freedom from the Nazi jackboot

‘YOU CANNOT cross the mountains in these shoes," 19-year-old Andre said. Sven Somme’s shoes were thin and worn and soaked from snow and wading. Despite a leather shortage during the German occupation of Norway, Andre willingly gave up his brand new, solid boots for Sven. It was the first link in a chain that conveyed him through isolated mountain country, still snow-covered in June 1944, to neutral Sweden 200 miles away.

The message from the Gestapo chief had been unambiguous. "You are going to be shot," he told Sven. "Is that clear?" There was no reason to disbelieve it. Sven’s brother, Jacob, who had devoted himself to resistance work, had been tortured at the notorious Grini concentration camp for 18 months before being killed. Sven felt fortunate for the quick end that was promised after his own court-martial.

As principal of a fisheries school on the island of Gossen, transformed from a peaceful, peasant land to a German camp and airfield, he had stood up to the occupiers. At first, he fought for the rights of his community, but gradually became involved in the resistance movement.

Sven circulated news gleaned from the BBC by illegal radio. He organised intelligence, working with farmers, tradesmen, teachers, civil engineers. He practiced taking photos from the small school boat through a buttonhole in his coat.

Arrested one midsummer evening for photographing a torpedo station, the Nazis took him by steamer to ndalsnes, ready for the morning train to the military headquarters at Dombas. Hope of escape glimmered when his Hungarian guard released the handcuffs so Sven could lie down, then slumped his chin on his chest and slept. Knowing he was under suspicion, Sven had planned two escape routes - by fishing boat to Shetland, a perilous passage taken by some 3,000 Norwegians, or on foot to Sweden. When he disappeared from the ship into the hills with nothing but a loaf of bread under one arm, he was in peak physical condition due to skiing, hunting trips and nightly expeditions by boat for the black market. Travelling often under cover of night, without a map or adequate clothing, he slept in the open or in deserted farms, and hid for several weeks in a camouflaged tent.

Ultimately, it was the wild mountain terrain and the people intimate with it that saved him.

Sixty years on, Sven’s daughter, Ellie, was presented with a brown paper bag by Selma, aged 80 and one of the locals who helped Sven’s escape. When Ellie opened the bag, she cried out: "Pappa’s shoes!"

The scuffed brown leather shoes Sven had left here 60 years earlier gaped at the ankles, the soles glass-smooth. It was a memorable way to start our journey. Five of us were setting off in Sven’s footsteps - his three children - Ellie, Bertie and Yuli - who have lived in Britain following his death in 1962, one of his grandchildren, Oliver, and myself, accompanying them as an experienced walker.

OUR JOURNEY, in very different circumstances to those in which Sven originally crossed the mountains, would take us through the plunge and skyscrape of these western fjords, where thousand-foot waterfalls fell, and into the highest mountains - the Dovre and Rondane ranges.

For Ellie, the walk became a memorial to her father, and reclaimed a country that she lost at the age of ten. "I didn’t feel the fear that he must have done, but I wanted to know what it was like for him, to have to walk every day, to long for a bed," she said.

For Yuli, it was also political - an awareness of the meaning of war and how small, proud Norway had been so overwhelmed by it. "We have to be vigilant, and not bury our heads in the sand about fascism," she said. "It can return."

Poised for flight, in a dark barn, talking with a friend, Sven also spoke of such concerns. "Were not these summer days of 1944 among the greatest days of the history of the world?" he wrote in his book A Biologist on the Run. "When four-fifths of all peoples were united in fighting Hitlerism in order to secure the human rights of mankind?"

In the book, Sven wrote: "It would have been madness to try to cross the mountain alone. First, the Erstad precipice, then 25 miles across an unfamiliar mountain landscape, and then how would I have been able to find my way down the Eikesdal?"

It was clear 60 years on that the beginning of the walk was horrendously difficult. Sven was guided up the precipice by Andre and the local mountaineer, Hans Randers Heen, on to a frozen landscape of mountain, lake and river from where the lower valleys looked "like deep and narrow cuts made with an enormous knife".

But people familiar with Sven’s story rallied to our "re-telling" to help again. With a nod to the past, a mountain guide - lean and fit 73-year old Odmund - appeared.

Our first climb took us to the turquoise Lake Grottevata, on a July evening that saw no nightfall. A mist was flung across the sunset to drape the peaks above us rose-pink. When we descended the 3,000ft wall to the tamed flat meadows of the Eikesdal valley, expecting to put up our tents, say goodbye to our guide and be truly setting out alone, beds were offered by Kristian Finset, the son of Nikolai, who himself had sheltered Sven.

As Nikolai had done 60 years earlier, Kristian’s son Viggo guided our steep climb out of this valley. Nikolai had carried three heavy planks; when they reached a canyon down which a river writhed, he laid them across rocks to make a bridge, and Sven’s hands were seized in farewell.

Viggo needed no planks to set us on our way; the river has long-since been diverted for a major hydro-electric project. But two generations on, the geography of the story still runs deep.

Sven was frequently drenched from wading rivers. He would walk for two hours, lie down to sleep, then walk again to avoid hypothermia. Despite his discomfort and fear, joy and a sense of freedom frequently surfaced. His spirits rose as he watched a herd of reindeer gallop through a bog, becoming lost in the spray of water and moss that rose from their hooves. Our journey was similarly fortified - red squirrels trapezed through branches, golden plovers called "tlui" and ran fitfully towards us. We grazed on blueberries and wood sorrel in the forests, picked berries in the marshes - a taste Sven characterised as "sunshine".

Sven and his companions sang their elation as they walked high snowfields, shouting to each other: "Is this the right way to Stockholm?"

"Righto, just turn left at the second set of traffic lights."

Likewise, we toughed out a long, hot stretch of road from Arsjoen towards Dombas. Crossing the Dovre hills towards the Grimsdal valley, we climbed on to a plateau, bleakly reminiscent of the Cairngorms, where it rained for the first time.

Grey shale had been spread by sluggish glaciers, smeared with yellow lichen. "He was so exposed," Ellie shivered. "How invisible a grey Nazi uniform would be here, how easily a figure moving alone could be picked off."

But the grey was mocked by fluorescent green mosses in the river beds, cushions of bright pink moss campion, and the silky-haired curl of alp anemone buds, Sven’s favourite flower. He was confident the Germans would never see it, or him, so anxious were they for what they called "civilisation".

Sven’s journey ended at a Swedish farm-house, his knock on the "door into freedom". Along with a false passport and ration cards, he received a message written in invisible ink. People at home were overjoyed that he had outwitted the 900 Germans sent to recapture him. The story has many heroes, and Sven was well aware of the personal risk his helpers took. After moving to Britain from Sweden, then back to liberated Norway in 1945, he gave each of them a watch engraved with thanks, still flourished proudly by descendants today.

Sven’s popularity and standing in the community helped secure his story in hearts and minds, as did the account he wrote. In A Biologist on the Run, he evokes a love for his country, its people and nature, a joy at the "morale and true friendship between men that had not been destroyed by the German occupation".

Earlier this month, his daughters took off their scarred boots. They ceremonially burnt the socks that had cushioned their feet; then the memorial to their father was complete.

Linda Cracknell is a prize-winning fiction writer and writer-in-residence at Brownsbank Cottage, Biggar, last home to Hugh MacDiarmid.

'I felt an urge to run but did not dare ...'

An extract from Biologist on the Run by Linda Cracknell.

THE RAILWAY blocked my way to Isfjorden, where I intended to go. I had to pass the railway station, where there was another sentry, some German barracks with a third sentry, the bridge over the rails with a fourth and the locomotive yard with a fifth sentry. I tried to walk as quietly and naturally as I could.

Then I discovered that I was still chewing the mouthful of sandwich which I had taken in the cabin when I left my guard there. I had been too excited to swallow it. I now made a conscious effort to do so, but my mouth was so dry I had to spit it out.

I did not dare to go to Romsdal. The main road and the railway to Oslo are running there, and there were many German camps along it. My plan was to head for one of the Isfjord valleys and try to get across the mountains to the Eikesdale valley. Then I could follow my old planned route into Eastern Norway across the Dovre Mountains and further into Sweden.

I took the Isfjord road, passing the long street through ndalsnes. I felt an urge to run but did not dare as I might be observed and halted by the Germans. It was just as well I resisted, because there was a camp with Russian POW’s close to the road where a prisoner was talking with the guard as I passed it.

I calculated my guard on board the ship might sleep for at least half-an-hour, perhaps even two hours, then he would awake, give the alarm, and every soldier in Andalsnes would be sent out in search of me. They would send cars along the roads and they would certainly use bloodhounds. My coat and briefcase were left on board the steamer. They would let the hounds sniff them first.

Therefore as soon as I had passed all houses and was well out of sight of the sentry at the prison camp, I started running. I had the fjord on my left, a steep slope on my right. Small streams were coming down the mountains because there was still much snow higher up.

Suddenly I jumped from the middle of the road sideways into one of the small streams and started climbing the slope. The hounds could not trace any scent in the stream. For one or two hours now I walked smaller and bigger burns, mostly upstream, towards the mountains.

Every now and then I listened but nothing could be heard except the rushing sound of the small burns and the birds which had started singing.

It was a lovely morning. The mountainside was covered with birch trees, bird-cherries and alders. The leaves had just come out and the moist air was filled with the sweet scene of spring.

Song-thrush and robins were singing and cuckoos calling everywhere. I felt strong and fit for the task ahead of me and felt sure the Germans would never again catch me. Suddenly there came over me a strong sense of freedom and joy. I had escaped torture, imprisonment and death, I was free like the birds singing around me. There was no school any more, no more responsibility, no property to take care of. Life was ahead of me. I was an outlaw.

Everything now was up to me. I could sing with joy, I was free, free, free.