Commentary: My grandfather’s teacher, murdered for resisting Nazis, has lessons for Americans today
“They took Knut’s teacher, you know.”
It was something my late grandmother often said when, as a child, I asked about life in Norway during World War II. Sometimes she’d talk about sawdust-laden bread rations and sharp-dressed thugs out and about for the five years Nazi forces brought Norway’s democracy to heel, but she seemed especially intent on getting across what happened to the educator who taught my grandfather (whose name is pronounced “kuh-noot,” not “newt”) at his childhood fjord-side farm.
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Now, with my grandmother 10 years deceased and my grandfather more than 30, we face an election in which one candidate threatens reprisals against his critics and has floated plans to certify teachers based on their patriotism and yank funding from public schools he dislikes. That refrain of my mor mor, “They took Knut’s teacher, you know,” rings uncomfortably loud.
As it happens, I visited the family farm (known as Mostraumen) last summer, and I was keen to learn more about the life of the teacher, Lars Nødtvedt. The tiny schoolhouse where he taught still stands on the property; during its prewar heyday, children in this remote corner of western Norway would take a boat to school at Mostraumen, a prosperous farm for its time.
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According to a local history book published in 1990, Nødtvedt started teaching in the small municipality of Modalen in 1915. Though he is honored in the area today as a teacher, the book describes him as something of a Renaissance man: A pioneer in fur trading, he was “the first of the teachers in Modalen to get a car,” an oddity for an area that had limited road access until recently.
Nødtvedt continued teaching through the Nazi invasion of Norway in May 1940, but he quit in early 1942 — along with thousands of other educators. At the time, the Nazis’ puppet government led by Vidkun Quisling was maneuvering to force a Nazified curriculum on schools, but the teachers weren’t having it. So, at grave risk to their lives and freedom, they walked off the job en masse.
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Remarkably, their collective act of resistance worked: A society without educators, an unwieldy complication for even the most adept political leader, easily overwhelmed the bumbling Quisling. By the end of 1942, most of the roughly 1,300 teachers who had been arrested and shipped to concentration camps were sent back home.
But Nødtvedt never taught again; he didn’t even survive the teachers’ strike.
His refusal to enable fascism extended beyond thwarting educational indoctrination. After he walked off his job, he was caught sheltering two resistance operatives on his property.
As my grandfather’s family and the history book tell it, the Gestapo arrested Nødtvedt that May, and he soon turned up in a local hospital showing obvious signs of torture. There, on June 7, 1942, the teacher who mentored a generation of children at the farm died, murdered by his Nazi captors.
The precise details of Nødtvedt’s resistance to fascism and occupation in Norway — how long he was involved and the extent of his activities — are difficult to pin down, given the limited historical sources. What we do know is that Nødtvedt was a teacher who followed his conscience. Records paint a picture of a dedicated, peaceful public servant, the kind you see everywhere in the world — except where fascism declares them to be “the enemy within” and forces them out or worse.
My grandfather and an entire generation of local children grew up knowing that their teacher had been taken and murdered for resisting fascists — for heroism against small men like Quisling, who truly are “the enemy within” as they seek to dismantle the foundations of truth and democracy through warped curricula. This sort of experience made such a mark on Norwegians that 70 years later, my grandmother was still impressing the lessons upon me.
Nødtvedt had taught in one of the most peaceful settings imaginable — a tiny schoolhouse on a fjord, next to a narrow strait where the water flows swiftly in whatever direction the tide dictates. Today, that part of Norway retains its old-country character, though with a lot more tourists. In the closest town to Mostraumen, a memorial to Nødtvedt and the other local teacher killed during the war, Knut Otterstad, stands in the churchyard cemetery where generations of my family are buried.
The memorial, as Norwegian monuments tend to do, draws attention with its simplicity — a granite boulder sitting on the grass, the names of the two men carved into the flat end, inscriptions noting that they were teachers killed by the German occupiers.
Looking at this memorial from 1996, it’s obvious what the community wants you to know: They took these teachers.
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