Second World War Literature Nína Rúna Kvaran
Prof. Júlían M. D’Arcy
The Concentration Camp Experience
As Seen in Icelandic Literature and Theatre
February 3rd 2004
Introduction
Human nature is a complex phenomenon. It is an evasive and difficult topic to define since the sphere of the human mind and intellect seems to have no obvious boundaries. The modern world we live in is a clear proof of the indisputable genius of the capacity of human will and determination. The disadvantage of this is that the self-consciousness, free will and imagination the human being possesses, can obviously, as is in the nature of such aspects, be used in various ways that unfortunately are not always wholly positive. In fact, sometimes, human behaviour is fully evil and brings about consequences and results that few of us enjoy feasting our minds on. One of these is the invention of war. It is a scheme as ancient as mankind itself and history has repeatedly proven it to be far superior to any diseases or mishaps when considering the death toll and suffering that are inescapable companions to war.
War can sometimes bring out the most admirable qualities in a human being where in hopeless situations; acts of courage, bravery and self-sacrifice are carried out in the most remarkable manner. Unfortunately, war also has a knack of bringing about the lowest kind of attributes known to man such as greed, selfishness, cowardice and cruelty. In particular, the Second World War is infamous for its magnitude, extreme horrors and unnecessary loss of lives. Not only did soldiers and citizens lose their lives in battles, air raids and other kind of conflicts, but people were also systematically exterminated in what is know as concentration camps. The survivors of concentration camp imprisonment have through the decades following the war tried to communicate to the world about their experience and among those that spoke out, was an Icelandic man named Leifur Muller. His book, written by Garðar Sverrisson, titled Býr Íslendingur hér [1] is a gruesome description of one man’s survival of the concentration camp and the aftermath of such an experience. Although quite a quantity of literature concerning the effects of the Second World War in Iceland exists, there certainly has very little been written on the concentration camp experience from an Icelandic point of view. This essay is going to be a brief reflection on the abovementioned book and the theatrical play it inspired.
A Brief History of the Concentration Camps
The history of the prison or concentration camp can be traced back to the Boer War in South-Africa (1899-1902) where the British invented them and used as tools against their enemies. Hitler’s Third Reich on the other hand, brought the entire concept to a level of incredible magnitude. The prison camp system was originally launched to eliminate all anti-Nazi behaviour and to get rid of those that did not fit in to the “perfect” new society for one reason or another. Authorities deliberately located these camps in as unwholesome a climate as possible and they tried to keep them away from the public eye. As things developed the Nazis changed tactics and instead of letting prisoners quickly die from starvation and abuse, they kept them alive for some time and even provided medical treatment when they were seriously ill so as to get a few extra weeks worth of profit out of them. It was called “extermination through work”. The SS made work contracts with many German companies and those contracts were in practical business terms called “Durchschnittliches Lebensdauer 9 Monate” (Sverrisson 107) which referred to the average lifetime of nine months per prisoner in the camps. Huge companies such as Siemens, AEG and Benz greedily took advantage of this free work force and made a fortune on these deals with the Nazis. On top of the profit the Nazis made from the manual labour of the prisoners, was added that of jewellery, clothes, watches, gold teeth, glasses and other personal belongings taken from their victims.
After having been arrested in 1942 by the Gestapo for trying to flee from Norway back to Iceland, 22-year-old student, Leifur Muller was in June 1943, transported to the infamous Sachsenhausen camps in Germany. The Sachsenhausen camp was the first camp the SS had constructed with the purpose of eliminating the enemies of Nazi policy. Before that Göring had built the camps in Dachau but Sachsenhausen was the central camp from which all the other camps in Germany and Europe, sprouted from.
Leifur’s Experience in Sachsenhausen
After reading the book, it is fully understandable that Leifur Muller carried a serious disliking to everything German, be it the language, culture and even the people themselves, for the rest of his life. He went so far as to actually change his last name from Müller into Muller after the war, so as to rid himself of all German influence from the spelling. He knew and acknowledged that a similar situation could have occurred with any nation and that the German public in general was not to blame for the atrocities that went on in the camps, but he could still never really get passed what his unfortunate stay in Germany did to him.
To put in very short words some of Leifur’s descriptions is emotionally strainging to say the least, due to the graphic nature of the book and the revulsion the descriptions themselves evoke. People were shaved bold, de-loused, re-clothed and put to work immediately on arrival to the camps. The humiliation of this process was profound although this treatment seemed mild compared to what was to come.
Each prisoner lost his/her name and was assigned a number instead. Leifur became prisoner number 68138 and he had a red triangle on his shirt. Prisoners were marked with different coloured triangles, red for political prisoners, green for real criminals from German prisons, black for “anti-social” prisoners (alcoholics, drug-addicts and the insane), blue for refugees, purple for people of a “wrong” religious inclination and a yellow star for Jews.
All inmates were assigned to barracks that were so overcrowded (and would be even more so by the end of the war) that up to three or four men would have to sleep in the same bed and take turns sleeping on the edge. The mattresses or bedclothes were never washed despite years of sweat, blood, urine, and even faeces from countless of prisoners, were all over them. Each barrack had toilet facilities that similarly were never cleaned and prisoners were not allowed to use soap nor hot water at all. Therefore the soup bowls they ate from were never properly washed and flies from the stinking toilets covered the area where prisoners ate so that they had difficulties not eating them as well. The food rations were extremely limited and mostly consisted of a very thin, foul smelling soup made from rotting leftover vegetables which made most men seriously ill when they first started eating it.
Everybody that was not on his or her deathbed had to work. There were various jobs to be found around the camps, most of them heavy-duty manual labour digging ditches and laying bricks to expand the camps. Leifur’s own first job was that of a guinea pig. He was assigned to a group of prisoners that were hired by a shoe company to test a new brand of boots. Each was given a pair in his size and some even numbers too small to see how the leather would expand. Then they started walking in circles until they had finished 40 kilometres. By that time some of the weaker men and those wearing boots that were too small, had already collapsed from the pain of bleeding and blistered feet and received a severe beating accompanied with kicks from the SS monitoring the process. Thankfully, Leifur did not have to repeat this ordeal but others that were being punished especially, including a group of English soldiers, were literarily walked to death. The skinniest men were forced to carry 15-kilo sacks on their backs to get the average weight just right for the boots. The English group did this cruel job every day for almost two years until they were all executed. Leifur’s admiration for these individuals that never gave up the hope of returning to England is evident in his words:
They were always talking about all the things they were going to do when they returned back home to England. One of them persistently described to me his girlfriend and I felt at times overwhelmed by his depictions of how he was going to embrace and kiss her when the war ended. That dream never came to be though. It wounded me immensely when these sincere and kind comrades of mine were killed (Sverrisson 113).[2]
Leifur did a number of jobs while in Sachsenhausen such as ditch digging, carrying potatoes, transporting bodies to the crematorium and eventually a kind of office job that really saved him from premature death by work. He did develop severe illnesses because the whole place was infested with bacteria and diseases. He caught a disease called Scheisserei, which was a kind of typhoid fever causing men in some cases to completely lose control over their bowel movements. He also contracted a disease called Phlegmone which was a sort of pain in the body that would in many cases start to ruin or eat the flesh of a particular body part or limb. Because of Leifur’s phlegmone of the leg, he managed to get himself out of the ditch work, which had been slowly killing him. Alongside with these diseases that killed thousands of people in the camps, Leifur suffered from severe skin problems such as sores and blisters on his body probably caused by the filthy environment and lack of proper nourishment.
But it was not only his own suffering that made his life a living hell while in Sachsenhausen but also that of those less fortunate then him. A number of very young boys, as young as 12, were brought to the camps where they were sexually abused by other inmates[3] and quickly consumed by diseases and eventually death. Leifur’s description of the fate of these unfortunate children is heartbreaking to say the least:
Most of these boys came from Eastern Europe and knew nothing about their parents’ fate but they nevertheless fantasized with the notion that somewhere in another camp, mum and dad might still be alive (Sverrisson 150).[4]
Survival and Aftermath
Leifur’s own explanations as to how he managed to simply survive are very sad indeed. Firstly he and other Scandinavians were at some point allowed to receive Red Cross food donations and without those occasional parcels, starvation would surely have killed him within a matter of months. Secondly, when Leifur returned to Iceland he quickly learnt not to speak of the emotional detachment that was the key in keeping a person sane in such a place, because people simply did not relate to that experience. Leifur claimed that all ideals of great compassion, sympathy for others and sacrifice were thoroughly misleading. It was each man for himself. Bribery and to think firstly about oneself were the keys to survival. He said that to begin with he suffered such emotional trauma from witnessing the horrors in Sachsenhausen that he found himself literarily on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He was a very young adult who’s self esteem was not fully developed at the time of his arrest and therefore he and his peers were usually much more badly affected by the mental and verbal abuse they received in the camps, than the older inmates who were tougher. After only a few weeks stay Leifur had formed a very hard shell and an almost indifference to what was happening around him. This psychological defence mechanism kept him and thousands of others from going insane and those that lacked it quickly perished mentally. Obviously the most serious side affect of this was that when those who survived finally escaped the camps, they had some severe emotional readjustment to do in the normal society they re-entered; a task quite impossible to many of them. Common aftermaths of concentration camp survivors were ailments such as:
- Neurosis, crankiness and restlessness
-Bad memory and difficulties with concentration
-Emotional imbalance
-Sadness and psychological discomforts
-Sleeping disorders
-Exhaustion
-Minority complex
-Lack of initiative
-Headaches
-Dizziness
-Disturbed nerve system (Sverrisson 242)
Leifur attributed his emotional recovery, although it was never really complete, to the support and understanding of his loving wife and children.
The Story on Stage
On October the 7th 1993 the play Býr Íslendingur hér? based on Garðar Sverrisson’s eponymous book was performed on stage for the first time in the theatre Íslenska leikhúsið. The director of the play was Þórarinn Eyfjörð, who took an enormous chance tackling such a project due to its sensitive nature both in material and production.
There were only two actors on stage, Halldór Björnsson playing the part of the doctor and Pétur Einarsson as Leifur Muller. The role of the doctor was extremely minor so Pétur Einarsson ruled the stage during the majority of the play and his was therefore really a solo performance. As a result of seeing the play I immediately wanted to read the book and found myself from then on a devoted admirer of Pétur Einarsson’s magnificent skills as a professional actor and stage performer. In total contrast to all prophesies that this kind of material would be disastrous to transport unto the stage, the play was a great success and received excellent reviews from critics. Súsanna Svavarsdóttir wrote for Morgunblaðið:
[ . . . ] little by little the story intensified and Leifur’s emotions spanned sadness, pain and anger; Pétur’s increasingly heated interpretation made the narration more horrifying and believable and his interpretation was very good (Svavarsdóttir 1993).[5]
She furthermore mentioned that despite the play consisting of an almost two hour monologue it was manoeuvred with such excellence by Pétur Einarsson and director Þórarinn Eyfjörð that it was a praiseworthy production indeed.
Critic, Sæmundur Guðvinsson was also deeply impressed by the play and expressed his appreciation as he wrote for Alþýðublaðið:
Those who have read the book Býr Íslendingur hér? will not be disappointed as they renew their experience. Those who have not yet read the book and are experiencing Leifur Muller’s memoirs for the first time in the theatre, will never be the same again (Guðvinsson 1993).
As an amateur critic and theatre lover, I have to admit that I fully agree with the above-mentioned critiques as the play was the most memorable one that I have ever seen and I have seen quite a few. Leifur’s memoirs are immensely sad and horrifyingly graphic in nature but due to Pétur Einarsson’s above-mentioned talent as an actor and the sensitivity with which the director handled this production, the result was in my view a truly magnificent theatrical experience for the audience. It can honestly be said that when the lights went on, there was not a dry cheek in the theatre.
Conclusion
When thinking about the Second World War in connection to Iceland, images of prosperity, relative comfort and romance are much more likely to prevail than those of horrors and human suffering. To even consider that an Icelander actually experienced what Leifur did as a prisoner of war seems preposterous since those of us who are Icelandic are so used to the idea of security. But as Leifur’s narration details, nothing is secure in this world and his was the fate of many unfortunate souls. Surprisingly, he was not the only Icelander who ended up in a concentration camp as the book reveal. In Sachsenhausen Leifur found to his immense surprise, another Icelander named Óskar Vilhjálmsson.
Óskar had been hired by the German radio station in Berlin to read the news in Icelandic because in Iceland, many people listened to the Nazi propaganda. One time this brave man ended his reading by saying in Icelandic: “And so I will return tomorrow and continue to read the same lie” (Sverrisson 161). Needless to say, Óskar never returned as somebody contacted the radio station in Germany and notified them of the meaning of his words. Unlike Leifur, Óskar ended his life at the age of thirty in Sachsenhausen due to severe illnesses. Nobody in Iceland knew the truth about his extremely sad fate until Leifur’s return.
Although transforming experiences such as Leifur’s into literature and other art forms may feel somehow unsettling, the truth is that is serves a multiple purpose. Firstly, truthful accounts of such experiences convey to people about the importance of consideration to others since we never know what people might have gone through in their lives. Secondly, it may serve as a source of psychological relief for the people that survived such atrocities. Art can in those cases become a vent through which emotions, feelings and pain can be aired. Thirdly, is has a certain preventative quality and that has become the motto of the remains of old concentration camps that today are kept as museums: May the living learn from the fate of the dead.
Bibliography
Sverrisson, Garðar. Býr Íslendingur hér? Reykjavík. Iðunn. 1988.
http://notendur.centrum.is/~stageart/byr%20islendingur%20her-syningin.html
[1] Roughly translates into Does an Icelander Live Here?
[2] My translation.
[3] The prisoners marked with the green triangle, real criminals, were in many cases murderers, rapists and even paedophiles. They did not only sexually attack the youngsters in the camps but many also received extra benefits from the SS for spying on other prisoners.
[4] My translation.
[5] My translation.
Prof. Júlían M. D’Arcy
The Concentration Camp Experience
As Seen in Icelandic Literature and Theatre
February 3rd 2004
Introduction
Human nature is a complex phenomenon. It is an evasive and difficult topic to define since the sphere of the human mind and intellect seems to have no obvious boundaries. The modern world we live in is a clear proof of the indisputable genius of the capacity of human will and determination. The disadvantage of this is that the self-consciousness, free will and imagination the human being possesses, can obviously, as is in the nature of such aspects, be used in various ways that unfortunately are not always wholly positive. In fact, sometimes, human behaviour is fully evil and brings about consequences and results that few of us enjoy feasting our minds on. One of these is the invention of war. It is a scheme as ancient as mankind itself and history has repeatedly proven it to be far superior to any diseases or mishaps when considering the death toll and suffering that are inescapable companions to war.
War can sometimes bring out the most admirable qualities in a human being where in hopeless situations; acts of courage, bravery and self-sacrifice are carried out in the most remarkable manner. Unfortunately, war also has a knack of bringing about the lowest kind of attributes known to man such as greed, selfishness, cowardice and cruelty. In particular, the Second World War is infamous for its magnitude, extreme horrors and unnecessary loss of lives. Not only did soldiers and citizens lose their lives in battles, air raids and other kind of conflicts, but people were also systematically exterminated in what is know as concentration camps. The survivors of concentration camp imprisonment have through the decades following the war tried to communicate to the world about their experience and among those that spoke out, was an Icelandic man named Leifur Muller. His book, written by Garðar Sverrisson, titled Býr Íslendingur hér [1] is a gruesome description of one man’s survival of the concentration camp and the aftermath of such an experience. Although quite a quantity of literature concerning the effects of the Second World War in Iceland exists, there certainly has very little been written on the concentration camp experience from an Icelandic point of view. This essay is going to be a brief reflection on the abovementioned book and the theatrical play it inspired.
A Brief History of the Concentration Camps
The history of the prison or concentration camp can be traced back to the Boer War in South-Africa (1899-1902) where the British invented them and used as tools against their enemies. Hitler’s Third Reich on the other hand, brought the entire concept to a level of incredible magnitude. The prison camp system was originally launched to eliminate all anti-Nazi behaviour and to get rid of those that did not fit in to the “perfect” new society for one reason or another. Authorities deliberately located these camps in as unwholesome a climate as possible and they tried to keep them away from the public eye. As things developed the Nazis changed tactics and instead of letting prisoners quickly die from starvation and abuse, they kept them alive for some time and even provided medical treatment when they were seriously ill so as to get a few extra weeks worth of profit out of them. It was called “extermination through work”. The SS made work contracts with many German companies and those contracts were in practical business terms called “Durchschnittliches Lebensdauer 9 Monate” (Sverrisson 107) which referred to the average lifetime of nine months per prisoner in the camps. Huge companies such as Siemens, AEG and Benz greedily took advantage of this free work force and made a fortune on these deals with the Nazis. On top of the profit the Nazis made from the manual labour of the prisoners, was added that of jewellery, clothes, watches, gold teeth, glasses and other personal belongings taken from their victims.
After having been arrested in 1942 by the Gestapo for trying to flee from Norway back to Iceland, 22-year-old student, Leifur Muller was in June 1943, transported to the infamous Sachsenhausen camps in Germany. The Sachsenhausen camp was the first camp the SS had constructed with the purpose of eliminating the enemies of Nazi policy. Before that Göring had built the camps in Dachau but Sachsenhausen was the central camp from which all the other camps in Germany and Europe, sprouted from.
Leifur’s Experience in Sachsenhausen
After reading the book, it is fully understandable that Leifur Muller carried a serious disliking to everything German, be it the language, culture and even the people themselves, for the rest of his life. He went so far as to actually change his last name from Müller into Muller after the war, so as to rid himself of all German influence from the spelling. He knew and acknowledged that a similar situation could have occurred with any nation and that the German public in general was not to blame for the atrocities that went on in the camps, but he could still never really get passed what his unfortunate stay in Germany did to him.
To put in very short words some of Leifur’s descriptions is emotionally strainging to say the least, due to the graphic nature of the book and the revulsion the descriptions themselves evoke. People were shaved bold, de-loused, re-clothed and put to work immediately on arrival to the camps. The humiliation of this process was profound although this treatment seemed mild compared to what was to come.
Each prisoner lost his/her name and was assigned a number instead. Leifur became prisoner number 68138 and he had a red triangle on his shirt. Prisoners were marked with different coloured triangles, red for political prisoners, green for real criminals from German prisons, black for “anti-social” prisoners (alcoholics, drug-addicts and the insane), blue for refugees, purple for people of a “wrong” religious inclination and a yellow star for Jews.
All inmates were assigned to barracks that were so overcrowded (and would be even more so by the end of the war) that up to three or four men would have to sleep in the same bed and take turns sleeping on the edge. The mattresses or bedclothes were never washed despite years of sweat, blood, urine, and even faeces from countless of prisoners, were all over them. Each barrack had toilet facilities that similarly were never cleaned and prisoners were not allowed to use soap nor hot water at all. Therefore the soup bowls they ate from were never properly washed and flies from the stinking toilets covered the area where prisoners ate so that they had difficulties not eating them as well. The food rations were extremely limited and mostly consisted of a very thin, foul smelling soup made from rotting leftover vegetables which made most men seriously ill when they first started eating it.
Everybody that was not on his or her deathbed had to work. There were various jobs to be found around the camps, most of them heavy-duty manual labour digging ditches and laying bricks to expand the camps. Leifur’s own first job was that of a guinea pig. He was assigned to a group of prisoners that were hired by a shoe company to test a new brand of boots. Each was given a pair in his size and some even numbers too small to see how the leather would expand. Then they started walking in circles until they had finished 40 kilometres. By that time some of the weaker men and those wearing boots that were too small, had already collapsed from the pain of bleeding and blistered feet and received a severe beating accompanied with kicks from the SS monitoring the process. Thankfully, Leifur did not have to repeat this ordeal but others that were being punished especially, including a group of English soldiers, were literarily walked to death. The skinniest men were forced to carry 15-kilo sacks on their backs to get the average weight just right for the boots. The English group did this cruel job every day for almost two years until they were all executed. Leifur’s admiration for these individuals that never gave up the hope of returning to England is evident in his words:
They were always talking about all the things they were going to do when they returned back home to England. One of them persistently described to me his girlfriend and I felt at times overwhelmed by his depictions of how he was going to embrace and kiss her when the war ended. That dream never came to be though. It wounded me immensely when these sincere and kind comrades of mine were killed (Sverrisson 113).[2]
Leifur did a number of jobs while in Sachsenhausen such as ditch digging, carrying potatoes, transporting bodies to the crematorium and eventually a kind of office job that really saved him from premature death by work. He did develop severe illnesses because the whole place was infested with bacteria and diseases. He caught a disease called Scheisserei, which was a kind of typhoid fever causing men in some cases to completely lose control over their bowel movements. He also contracted a disease called Phlegmone which was a sort of pain in the body that would in many cases start to ruin or eat the flesh of a particular body part or limb. Because of Leifur’s phlegmone of the leg, he managed to get himself out of the ditch work, which had been slowly killing him. Alongside with these diseases that killed thousands of people in the camps, Leifur suffered from severe skin problems such as sores and blisters on his body probably caused by the filthy environment and lack of proper nourishment.
But it was not only his own suffering that made his life a living hell while in Sachsenhausen but also that of those less fortunate then him. A number of very young boys, as young as 12, were brought to the camps where they were sexually abused by other inmates[3] and quickly consumed by diseases and eventually death. Leifur’s description of the fate of these unfortunate children is heartbreaking to say the least:
Most of these boys came from Eastern Europe and knew nothing about their parents’ fate but they nevertheless fantasized with the notion that somewhere in another camp, mum and dad might still be alive (Sverrisson 150).[4]
Survival and Aftermath
Leifur’s own explanations as to how he managed to simply survive are very sad indeed. Firstly he and other Scandinavians were at some point allowed to receive Red Cross food donations and without those occasional parcels, starvation would surely have killed him within a matter of months. Secondly, when Leifur returned to Iceland he quickly learnt not to speak of the emotional detachment that was the key in keeping a person sane in such a place, because people simply did not relate to that experience. Leifur claimed that all ideals of great compassion, sympathy for others and sacrifice were thoroughly misleading. It was each man for himself. Bribery and to think firstly about oneself were the keys to survival. He said that to begin with he suffered such emotional trauma from witnessing the horrors in Sachsenhausen that he found himself literarily on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He was a very young adult who’s self esteem was not fully developed at the time of his arrest and therefore he and his peers were usually much more badly affected by the mental and verbal abuse they received in the camps, than the older inmates who were tougher. After only a few weeks stay Leifur had formed a very hard shell and an almost indifference to what was happening around him. This psychological defence mechanism kept him and thousands of others from going insane and those that lacked it quickly perished mentally. Obviously the most serious side affect of this was that when those who survived finally escaped the camps, they had some severe emotional readjustment to do in the normal society they re-entered; a task quite impossible to many of them. Common aftermaths of concentration camp survivors were ailments such as:
- Neurosis, crankiness and restlessness
-Bad memory and difficulties with concentration
-Emotional imbalance
-Sadness and psychological discomforts
-Sleeping disorders
-Exhaustion
-Minority complex
-Lack of initiative
-Headaches
-Dizziness
-Disturbed nerve system (Sverrisson 242)
Leifur attributed his emotional recovery, although it was never really complete, to the support and understanding of his loving wife and children.
The Story on Stage
On October the 7th 1993 the play Býr Íslendingur hér? based on Garðar Sverrisson’s eponymous book was performed on stage for the first time in the theatre Íslenska leikhúsið. The director of the play was Þórarinn Eyfjörð, who took an enormous chance tackling such a project due to its sensitive nature both in material and production.
There were only two actors on stage, Halldór Björnsson playing the part of the doctor and Pétur Einarsson as Leifur Muller. The role of the doctor was extremely minor so Pétur Einarsson ruled the stage during the majority of the play and his was therefore really a solo performance. As a result of seeing the play I immediately wanted to read the book and found myself from then on a devoted admirer of Pétur Einarsson’s magnificent skills as a professional actor and stage performer. In total contrast to all prophesies that this kind of material would be disastrous to transport unto the stage, the play was a great success and received excellent reviews from critics. Súsanna Svavarsdóttir wrote for Morgunblaðið:
[ . . . ] little by little the story intensified and Leifur’s emotions spanned sadness, pain and anger; Pétur’s increasingly heated interpretation made the narration more horrifying and believable and his interpretation was very good (Svavarsdóttir 1993).[5]
She furthermore mentioned that despite the play consisting of an almost two hour monologue it was manoeuvred with such excellence by Pétur Einarsson and director Þórarinn Eyfjörð that it was a praiseworthy production indeed.
Critic, Sæmundur Guðvinsson was also deeply impressed by the play and expressed his appreciation as he wrote for Alþýðublaðið:
Those who have read the book Býr Íslendingur hér? will not be disappointed as they renew their experience. Those who have not yet read the book and are experiencing Leifur Muller’s memoirs for the first time in the theatre, will never be the same again (Guðvinsson 1993).
As an amateur critic and theatre lover, I have to admit that I fully agree with the above-mentioned critiques as the play was the most memorable one that I have ever seen and I have seen quite a few. Leifur’s memoirs are immensely sad and horrifyingly graphic in nature but due to Pétur Einarsson’s above-mentioned talent as an actor and the sensitivity with which the director handled this production, the result was in my view a truly magnificent theatrical experience for the audience. It can honestly be said that when the lights went on, there was not a dry cheek in the theatre.
Conclusion
When thinking about the Second World War in connection to Iceland, images of prosperity, relative comfort and romance are much more likely to prevail than those of horrors and human suffering. To even consider that an Icelander actually experienced what Leifur did as a prisoner of war seems preposterous since those of us who are Icelandic are so used to the idea of security. But as Leifur’s narration details, nothing is secure in this world and his was the fate of many unfortunate souls. Surprisingly, he was not the only Icelander who ended up in a concentration camp as the book reveal. In Sachsenhausen Leifur found to his immense surprise, another Icelander named Óskar Vilhjálmsson.
Óskar had been hired by the German radio station in Berlin to read the news in Icelandic because in Iceland, many people listened to the Nazi propaganda. One time this brave man ended his reading by saying in Icelandic: “And so I will return tomorrow and continue to read the same lie” (Sverrisson 161). Needless to say, Óskar never returned as somebody contacted the radio station in Germany and notified them of the meaning of his words. Unlike Leifur, Óskar ended his life at the age of thirty in Sachsenhausen due to severe illnesses. Nobody in Iceland knew the truth about his extremely sad fate until Leifur’s return.
Although transforming experiences such as Leifur’s into literature and other art forms may feel somehow unsettling, the truth is that is serves a multiple purpose. Firstly, truthful accounts of such experiences convey to people about the importance of consideration to others since we never know what people might have gone through in their lives. Secondly, it may serve as a source of psychological relief for the people that survived such atrocities. Art can in those cases become a vent through which emotions, feelings and pain can be aired. Thirdly, is has a certain preventative quality and that has become the motto of the remains of old concentration camps that today are kept as museums: May the living learn from the fate of the dead.
Bibliography
Sverrisson, Garðar. Býr Íslendingur hér? Reykjavík. Iðunn. 1988.
http://notendur.centrum.is/~stageart/byr%20islendingur%20her-syningin.html
[1] Roughly translates into Does an Icelander Live Here?
[2] My translation.
[3] The prisoners marked with the green triangle, real criminals, were in many cases murderers, rapists and even paedophiles. They did not only sexually attack the youngsters in the camps but many also received extra benefits from the SS for spying on other prisoners.
[4] My translation.
[5] My translation.
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