“None the less we bid it welcome, and once more fix our hopes, our burning wishes, and our ache of longing on the new year. The news is excellent, and all things considered there seems every reason to take a rather more cheerful view of things after all.” (From Day to Day, January 2, 1944) …
Lauritz Sand was born in Trondheim, Norway on October 1, 1879. Like Odd Nansen, Sand was artistic, and like Odd Nansen, he studied architecture. When his artistic career failed to get off the ground, he elected to pursue a military career instead, with the Royal Dutch East Indies Army. Following his retirement from the military …
Odd Nansen was born 121 years ago today, making this (at least in Hobbit-speak) his twevlety-first birthday. Whatever the year, it is always an occasion to remember and commemorate. In remarks given by then U.S. President John F. Kennedy at a fundraiser held on November 29, 1962 for the benefit of a yet-to-be-built National Cultural …
On this day in 1951 Thomas Buergenthal first set foot on American soil. He was 17 years-old. During a good part of those 17 years Tom had successfully defeated the Nazis’ best efforts to murder him, whether through the liquidation of the Kielce Ghetto, internment in Auschwitz-Birkenau, or participation in the Auschwitz Death March. But …
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History has just recently published an article I wrote about John Steinbeck and his World War II novel, The Moon Is Down. I have previously written (here) about the number of parallels between Steinbeck and Odd Nansen. The article, entitled “Piéce De Résistance,” describes Steinbeck’s transition from successful novelist …
Odd Nansen died forty-nine years ago today, age 71. The anniversary of his death always seems like an appropriate time for remembrance and reflection. (See my previous observations on this date in 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2016). Recently I finished reading No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World …
Today is Anne Frank’s birthday. Had she lived, she would be 93 years old. The exact date and cause of her death are unknown, although it is now believed that she succumbed in late February, 1945, probably to a disease such as typhus. Anne, her family, and the other inhabitants of the secret annex in …
On this date in 1944, U.S. Naval Task Group 22.3 captured German U-boat U-505 on the high seas near the Cape Verde Islands. It was the first successful capture by the Navy of an enemy ship on the high seas since the War of 1812. I first became aware of U-505 while doing research on …
Today marks Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. We vow never to forget, and never to let it happen again. Today also happens to be the 77th anniversary of the final entry in Odd Nansen’s diary, From Day to Day: “What on earth am I to write? It’s as impossible today as on all the …
So wrote Odd Nansen in his diary entry dated April 3, 1942, eighty years ago today. Nansen had just finished describing in his diary an episode where 50 men, ordered to report in their civilian clothes, think they are about to be released (as an Easter gift), only to learn at the last moment that …
“I want to thank Tim Boyce for this . . . . It would be lost to history if people like Tim Boyce did not devote the effort and time and expense–a good part of his life–to preserve the Odd Nansen story. It is a moving and gripping story. . . .”
–U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal
Hailed by The New Yorker as “among the most compelling documents to come out of the war,” From Day to Day is a World War II concentration camp diary—one of only a handful ever translated into English—secretly written by Odd Nansen, a Norwegian political prisoner. Arrested in January 1942, Nansen, son of polar explorer and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen (Nobel Peace Prize 1922) was held captive for the duration of the war in various Nazi camps in Norway and Germany.
Nansen’s diary entries detail his palpable longing for his wife and family, his constantly frustrated hopes for release, the quiet strength and sometimes ugly prejudices of his fellow prisoners, and his horror at the especially barbaric treatment reserved for the Jews. The diary brilliantly illuminates Nansen’s daily struggle, not only to survive, but to preserve his sanity and maintain his humanity in a world engulfed by fear and hate.
First published in English in 1949, From Day to Day had been out of print for almost seventy years. The new edition contains entries and sketches never previously available in English. It also features a new introduction and extensive annotations by Timothy Boyce and a preface by Thomas Buergenthal, whose life (as a ten year-old) Nansen saved while in Sachsenhausen, later recounted in his own memoir A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy.
