Book Review: 'Occupied' by Kurt Blorstad

The German invasions of Denmark and Norway in April 1940, code-named Operation Weserübung - the first major Nazi military campaigns since the invasion of Poland seven months earlier - were the invasions that turned a regional conflict between the Third Reich and the Anglo-French alliance into a second world war.  And Kurt Blorstad's father came of age in the middle of that catalyst.

Blorstad's novel Occupied is a novel based on his father's experiences as a boy born to Norwegian parents in the United States and growing up in Norway before and during the German occupation.  It casts light on a theater of World War II less well known than the Nazi occupations of Poland and France or the fight against the Japanese in the Pacific. Trygve is a boy who goes with his mother and younger brothers to live with his maternal grandmother in the late 1930s while his father, living and working in the United States, hopes to send for them to come to America.  It starts out as a typical coming-of-age story in the Scandinavian countryside at a time when rural life there was unaffected by modernity. Trygve and his brothers Thoralf and Odd learn how to farm and fish as well as harvest peat cakes for home heating, and Trygve learns the value of gainful employment by baking bread in a small general store.  Their mother and grandmother run the family together through the birth of Trygve's sister Thelma and with help from Trygve's kindly uncle.  The contrast between the old ways of rural life in 1930s Norway and the more advanced, more urban living pattern that Trygve's father has found in America are obvious, and Blorstad's illustrations of the mundane realities of Trygve's life are in fact a study in building character strong enough to face adversity - which becomes clear when life for Trygve's family and neighbors changes the day Adolf Hitler gives the signal to the German armies lying in wait to commence Operation Weserübung.

The German occupation of Norway illustrates how Trygve and his older brother Thoralf went from being boys to being men as they worked to keep their family well-fed and free from harm, trying to stay one step ahead of German soldiers who could arrest them for the smallest transgression.  But Trtygve finds his real strength in helping Norwegian resistance fighters and spying for them on the local German military base and prison camp, taking risks in helping to protect his country while assuming greater responsibility for his family.  While you know that Trygve will survive - the story opens with Trygve in the summer of 1999 telling his tale to his own son -  you'll be left in suspense wondering how he will survive and whether his family will make it through intact.

Occupied may seem like old hat to readers of World War II novels set in other Axis-occupied countries, but there are some telling moments here.  One involves the attempt by the Germans to secure a source of "hard water" that was later revealed to be part of the Nazis' attempt to beat the Allies in the race to build an atomic bomb.  Even if you've read novels about Axis-occupied lands elsewhere, the book is fresh and revealing because of the often-overlooked Nazi occupation of Norway and how its strategic proximity to Great Britain made it an important front in the war.  Occupied is Blorstad's noble effort to to look at the war in Europe in a whole new aspect and from a whole new perspective.