War Diaries, 1939-1945

by Astrid Lindgren

  The war continues more or less as usual. An American offensive in the Pacific, they said on the radio news this morning. Invasion, invasion, invasion, they can’t stop talking about it, and what they mean is an Allied invasion on the continent – not like 1940, when ‘invasion’ meant a German invasion of Britain, which we were expecting any minute, but it never came. That was when Hitler should have mounted his invasion, when he had his big chance, but he missed it.

  Anyway, we haven’t seen any invasion yet, though things look rather ominous in Sicily. The Allied bombing continues, with feeble resistance from the Axis. Cologne Cathedral, probably Germany’s finest piece of architecture, has suffered bomb damage and the German newspapers are yelling about British vandalism – but what did they do in 1940?

  17 JULY

  There have been major developments since last time, but our busy days in Småland left me no time to write about them. It started with a big Russian offensive, with massive bloodshed on both sides. At Kursk, I think it was called. Then a few days after that big battle started, the Allies pulled off a landing on Sicily, where there’s now heavy fighting. It said on the news that the Allies are only 10km from Catania and it’s surely only a matter of time until all resistance is beaten down. After that it’ll probably be the mainland’s turn, I expect. I suppose you could call this the start of the much-vaunted invasion. The Allies are dropping leaflets over Italy, urging the Italian people to sue for peace.

  I forgot to write about our phenomenon Gunder Hägg, who’s in America and running like the blazes. He’s run three races, all at different distances – and though he didn’t beat his own world records he beat his American opponents. ‘Gunder the Wonder,’ they call him – and tonight he’s running his fourth race. We all take a keen interest in his success and he’s considered a first-rate ambassador for Sweden in the USA at the moment.

  Sture, Karin and I arrived here in Furusund the day before yesterday. Lars is still in Småland, busy with farming, German and maths. We picked our first chanterelles yesterday. Summer isn’t very reliable this year, you have to seize the moment. And now I’m off to bed to read a bit of All världens berättare [Storytellers Around the World]; today it’s [Maupassant’s] ‘Ball of Fat’.

  25 JULY

  Well, as the following newspaper cuttings show, Hitler and Musso had a meeting, and Rome got bombed. The assumption is that Hitler wanted to see Musso to stop him making a separate peace deal. ‘Italy chooses the path of honour’, the Italian papers said as a riposte to the leaflets – but there are peace rallies going on in the country and the people want peace. On Sicily the Allies are moving forward little by little; it’s going terribly well, Churchill says. In an order of the day issued on Saturday, Stalin declared that Germany’s July offensive had been stopped and 70,000 Germans had fallen. Berlin doesn’t consider the summer offensive to have reached its peak yet. The number of Russians killed is put at a third of a million. Even if both sides are telling packs of lies, you can’t help being petrified at the thought of all the human misery behind it.

  Recently I’ve been reading in Grimberg’s history of the world about ancient Rome and all the bloodbaths and atrocities, proscriptions and wars of conquest. Reading the papers and coming across the same geographical names, one simply despairs at how little humanity has learnt in the intervening centuries.

  In spite of everything people have started to hope, not tomorrow, perhaps not this year, but at least not in some hopelessly distant future. And Italy’s going to collapse pretty soon, everyone thinks so.

  And then Gunder Hägg ran his best US race yet – an English mile in 4.05.3.

  And summer’s really arrived now. Sture, Karin and I have been making the most of it here in Furusund: we row to our bathing island in the mornings and Linnéa and I pick berries in the afternoons. Lasse’s still in Småland and I miss him like mad, especially in the evenings. But he’s happiest there, and he’s coming over for a brief stay in a week’s time, before he and I go back to town to get down to the German and maths. Karin swims like a little fish now and is thrilled that she’s bold enough to throw herself in pretty much anywhere.

  [Press cuttings. One undated and unidentified: ‘The Allied message to the people of Italy’. Roosevelt and Churchill appeal to them to surrender. Dagens Nyheter, 21 July 1943: ‘Axis leaders reject enemy speculation’. Envoy Dr Schmidt threatens ‘vengeful retaliation’ – Astrid heads this cutting ‘Crap’. Dagens Nyheter, the same day: After the bombing of Rome, petrol is free and loaded vehicles stream out of the city.]

  26 JULY

  I wrote that last night. But on the radio this morning we heard the really sensational news: Mussolini has been dismissed by [King] Victor Emmanuel and Marshal Badoglio has been appointed his successor. Hey ho! Tiddley pom and fiddle-de-dee! The hydra of Fascism has lost its head. Now – now – now perhaps humanity is starting on the road to recovery of its full health. That bastard who (having shaken some life into those Italians, one has to admit) despatched the peaceable Italian people to Abyssinia on a war of conquest in 1935, initiating all these years of unrest, who once there unleashed gas attacks on defenceless natives, who thanks to his intervention in Spain prolonged the terrible civil war and who, incidentally, by creating Fascism, also provided the conditions for that civil war, and also the conditions, or to be more precise, the model, for National Socialism in Germany, which in turn caused this most terrible world war of all time – this grand bastard has now been sent off into a corner to await the verdict of history, which will assuredly be harsh. Phew! That was a long sentence, but we’re talking about world history here. They say he’s ill, stomach cancer, and if anybody deserves stomach cancer, it has to be him.

  So that was Benito Mussolini! Could it be Hitler next please?

  Prime Minister Churchill’s statement in the House of Commons on Tuesday, on the situation in Italy, began like this:

  ‘The House will have heard with satisfaction of the downfall of one of the principal criminals of this desolating war. The end of Mussolini’s long and severe reign over the Italian people undoubtedly marks the close of an epoch in the life of Italy. The keystone of the Fascist arch has crumbled, and without attempting to prophesy, it does not seem unlikely that the entire Fascist edifice will fall to the ground in ruins, if it has not already so fallen.’

  29 JULY

  The Fascist Party has been dissolved. Serious unrest in Milan. Running battles in the streets. Many civilians and soldiers killed. The masses are demanding immediate peace. The military arsenal stormed. Demonstrations in support of the Soviet Union.

  An American newspaper correspondent called Victor Emmanuel ‘a moronic little king’, which upset Roosevelt.

  4 AUGUST

  Today there was a memorial service for the crew of the Ulven, which has finally been brought up from the watery grave where it has been lying since April. Five died of mine injuries (German mine in Swedish waters, of course) and the rest drowned – a quick death, that is – and thank God for that.

  And Sibylla had her fourth princess last night.

  6 AUGUST

  Finally, finally they’re stopping the transit arrangements that the whole Swedish nation has detested so much. I expect Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning and Trots Allt will be shouting for joy, they fought like lions! After all, this breach of neutrality was forced on us and it gives us a clear sense of Germany’s current weakness that it’s granted us ‘permission’ to stop the wretched business. In Norway there’s been huge bitterness against us because of the transits and the view there is most definitely that they started while the war in Norway was still going on. I hope and believe that our government’s firm denial of this is a true reflection of what happened.

  God knows whether the war is actually going to end soon, all the same! Germany’s debacle is hanging in the air, so to speak. Things are going lousily in Russia, the Russians have taken Orel, in Sicily Catania has fallen and it’s soon going to be a Tunis in miniature. Ital
y hasn’t given up, however, even though the people are demonstrating and demanding peace. The dreadful bombing of Germany goes on; one can’t help weeping over the accounts from Hamburg, just think, there are still children there, it’s heart-rending, terrible, unbearable. I’ve just read Jean -Jacques Agapit’s book [Dites-le ‘leur’ (Tell ‘Them’)], an account of the hell that wounded French prisoners of war went through at a German hospital. The whole book is drowning in blood and pus and I’m now so fed up [in English] with everything war-related that I haven’t the words for it. And how must it be in the countries where they have those atrocities right in front of their eyes on a daily basis? It’s a good book, but still didn’t make such an impression on me as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which came out between these two world wars. When I was reading it, I would creep under the covers at night (this was at Atlasgatan) and shed tears of despondency, and I remember thinking that if there was ever another war and Sweden thought of joining in, I would go on my knees to the government and implore them not to let all hell break loose. I would shoot Lars myself rather than let him go to war, I thought. How they must suffer, the poor mothers on this insane planet. When I thought of the crew of the Ulven and when I read Agapit’s book, I tried to imagine my Lars on the sunken submarine (when we thought they were trapped on the seabed, still alive) or in a fever with suppurating wounds in a war hospital, and simply imagining it was so agonizing I could hardly endure it! So how must it feel to those for whom such things aren’t imagination but cruel reality? How can it be possible that humanity has to suffer such torment and why do we have war? Does it really take no more than a couple of individuals like Hitler and Mussolini to drive a whole world into destruction and chaos? Please, please, please let it be over soon, the bloodshed at least; then there’s bound to be all the other misery that follows in the wake of war. Grandmother goes around these days all perky and optimistic and thinks that as soon as we have peace, everything will be all right again. She seems sure humanity will be happy as long as the coffee starts flowing again and rationing is scrapped, here and abroad, but the utterly desperate wounds left by the war aren’t going to be healed by a drop of coffee. Peace can’t give mothers back their sons, or the little children of Hamburg and Warsaw back their lives. The hatred doesn’t end the day peace comes, those whose relations have been tormented to death in German concentration camps won’t forget anything just because there’s peace and the memory of the thousands of children who starved to death in Greece will most certainly still be in their mothers’ hearts, if those mothers themselves survived. All the war-wounded will still be limping about with a leg or an arm missing, those who lost their sight are still just as blind and those whose nervous systems were torn to shreds in the inhuman tank battles will not recover, either, just because peace arrives. But still, but still – please let peace come soon, so people can gradually start coming back to their senses.

  And yet – what is peace going to look like? What will happen to poor Finland? And will Bolshevism, with all the terror and tyranny it implies, be given free rein in Europe? Those who have already lost their lives in this war could turn out to be the most fortunate.

  Summer 1943 is drawing to a close – or perhaps it’s just how I see it, since my summer leave is over. Tomorrow Lars and I go to Stockholm. The weather here in Furusund has been fine and warm, but today it rained and felt quite autumnal in every way. Karin and Linnéa are going to stay on for a while. Karin’s finally overcome her fear of swimming in deep water. She’s also learnt to jump from the springboard on the jetty, to her own huge gratification. Lars is coming back to re-sit his German and maths. We’ve had various clashes while we’ve been together this summer because he’s so averse to studying in the holidays.

  [Typed transcript of a letter from Astrid’s work at the censor’s office from Norway about hatred and revenge propaganda, terrible treatment inflicted by the Nazis and a call for the Norwegian people to swear a solemn oath never to forget Gestapo terror. Also a press cutting from Dagens Nyheter, 15 August 1943: ‘Huge losses on both sides in the Battle of Orel’.]

  That’s all for today!

  26 AUGUST

  As has been reported – Roosevelt and Churchill met in Quebec. Stalin wasn’t there, the little squirt. It caused a great sensation when Litvinov, Russia’s ambassador to Washington, was suddenly called home and replaced by someone else. This has been interpreted as a sign that the Russians and the other two Allied partners have fallen out with each other. Russia wants a second front, and as such they will accept nothing but an invasion across the Channel. Every amateur pundit has something to say these days about the possibility of a separate peace between Germany and Russia, which would really put Britain and America in a spot. For Germany, it would probably be the only way out of a collapse that looks imminent. The bombing of Berlin has started and is expected to proceed much as in Hamburg.

  There’s been a lot of unrest in Denmark of late, loads of sabotage and out-and-out clashes between Germans and Danes, especially in Odense.

  After lots of intensive revision with me, Lars re-sat his German and maths and made it into the next year. Karin’s started in year three and got a new ‘Miss’, Mrs Adin, who seems to be quite sharp and not all that young. To celebrate Lars getting through, he and I went with Karin’s express permission to the 7 p.m. show at the pictures. Sture got home at 8.30 to find Karin crying bitterly. She’d started her homework, revising her times tables, and found that in her sleepy state she didn’t know them. So then she sat up with Sture until I got back at 9.30, and threw herself into my arms in tears. But I soon consoled her. Then she fell asleep and forgot the whole affair. She couldn’t escape a little throat infection before school started, and today I’m in bed with a tickly sore throat. But I shall get up in a little while and pop down to NK [department store] to buy some blouse fabric for Karin and some material to repair my fur with. We’re also going to bottle 10kg of French beans, so the day won’t be wasted.

  THIS EVENING

  There are reports in Aftonbladet of major disturbances in Denmark. I’ll cut out the piece.

  29 AUGUST

  I forgot to save it. But today we heard that a state of emergency has been declared in Denmark. Yesterday telephone lines with Denmark were cut, and here in Sweden we were seriously worried about what was happening. Today we’ve had the explanation. The Danish government was given an ultimatum to restore order in the country, which has been jeopardized recently by sabotage, strikes, street riots and the like. As the government didn’t consider itself able to succeed, a state of emergency was imposed. Anyone who argues is hauled up in front of a German court martial; strikes or incitement to strike are punishable by death. All gatherings of people are prohibited, as is all traffic after dark. Traffic between Sweden and Denmark has been halted (and there’s us with the Danish national athletics team in Stockholm today). Communication by telephone – and telegraph – is still blocked. I bet it’s going to be as hellish in Denmark as in Norway.

  A Swedish civil plane, the Gladan, on a flight from England to Sweden under Captain Lindner vanished last Friday and hasn’t been heard of since. It was probably shot down. Swedish fishing boats off the west coast, which were peacefully fishing in international waters as they always have, came under machine-gun fire from a German merchant vessel. Twelve fishermen are missing.

  King Boris of Bulgaria died yesterday, officially from angina pectoris (just back from a conference with Hitler), but according to the rumours shot in the abdomen by a police inspector. He is succeeded by his six-year-old son, Simeon II.

  So this has been the state of affairs in Denmark since Sunday 29 July 1943. I must definitely paste in the proclamation of the state of emergency as well!

  [Press cutting from Dagens Nyheter, 30 August 1943: ‘Regulations for the state of emergency in Denmark’.]

  30 AUGUST

  I think they’re running completely wild in Denmark. Just listen:

  [Astrid’s follow
ing comments are interspersed between pasted-in press cuttings. Dagens Nyheter, 30 August 1943: ‘Nine Danish ships flee to Sweden, the rest sunk’. ‘Copenhagen naval port blown up’. ‘Battle for the Lifeguards’ barracks’. “I’m a dead man,” declared Denmark’s civilian Nazi administrator Dr Best after visit to Berlin. ‘Danish government under German military guard’.]

  Mussolini’s daughter and son-in-law seem to have got away.

  [Unidentified cutting.]

  Eleven Norwegians have been executed for spying.

  Germany has sent a ludicrously caustic reply to our protest about the shooting of Swedish fishing boats:

  [Press cutting from Dagens Nyheter, 30 August 1943: ‘Sharp response from Berlin to fishermen’s protest’.]

  And the Germans are furious with the Swedish press for stirring up agitation against Germany. Which it is, in fact.

  [Press cutting from Dagens Nyheter, 30 August 1943: ‘PS The Swedish press is spiteful’.]

  A rather silly article about Mussolini by Dagens Nyheter’s Rome correspondent:

  [Press cutting from Dagens Nyheter, 30 August 1943: ‘Dictator’s bathing-resort flirtation turned into idyllic triangle drama’.]

  1 SEPTEMBER

  [Unidentified press cuttings about Denmark with a map (the eastern edge showing Spain, Portugal and Ireland is missing)]

  I put in the truncated map above just to show how poor little Sweden is squeezed in Germany’s grip, just like Switzerland. But notwithstanding that, we’re cursing and swearing at Germany, we and the Swiss. The map in its original state showed how pitifully few European countries have been able to stay out of the war: Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal and Éire. Seeing the map, you really understand what an extraordinary blessing it is that we still have peace, and are so well off in every way, for now, with the war passing its fourth anniversary and our neighbours up here in the north in such dire straits.