Face to Face

Some place names in Norway’s recent history have a sombre ring to them: Grini, Møllergata, Victoria terrasse, Villa Grande at Bygdøy and Falstad — a symbol of oppression, inhumanity, lawlessness and cruelty, a memorial we still today can experience — face to face.

Falstad is much more than just a place name. Falstad is a place on the map, in history books, in stories — and for some it is the stuff of nightmares. And then there are the faces of those that were there: the victims, informers, prison guards and the people who tried to help.

On 6 October 1942, nearly 65 years ago, the Germans declared a state of emergency in central Norway. In the course of three days, 34 Norwegians were executed in the woods at Falstad. Ten people from Trondheim were shot for resistance activities. Two and a half years after the war had ended, 46 graves containing 205 bodies were discovered in the woods there. Of these, 43 were Norwegians. The majority were from the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

Exhausted prisoners of war, humiliated, under duress, stripped of their dignity.

After Grini, Falstad was the second largest of the camps the Germans set up in Norway. About 4 500 people from 13 countries spent time in this tough prison camp. For many of them, Falstad was a temporary place of internment on a systematic, industrially organised track leading to the extermination camps in Germany and Poland — to more suffering and death.

Falstad is now a memorial in a larger European landscape of similar camps and monuments. Visiting Falstad today is a poignant experience. The buildings have been exquisitely renovated. The surroundings are beautiful, both the Trondheim fjord and the woods beyond. It is difficult to imagine that these are the very buildings where people screamed with pain and desperation. Behind these windows and walls, human beings treated other human beings with horrifying cruelty. Prisoners were forced to crawl on their hands and knees round the tree in the exercise yard, and to pick up each fallen leaf with their mouths. Before they themselves fell to the ground.

There are many moving personal stories from Falstad, including those of the boys who were sent there when the buildings housed an institution for “wayward juveniles”, as they were called then. When I visited Falstad halfway through the renovation, I could still see faded children’s drawings on the walls in the dorms. They also told a story. They also put faces to the place.

Symbols are created through choices and actions. It is also in our power to change or extend the meaning and content of these symbols. Buildings and places can also be transformed into memorials and symbols. They become places that convey experiences, stories and insight. To us who visit them today — face to face.

Falstad has undergone such a transformation. It is now a national education and documentation centre dedicated to the history of prisoners of war and human rights. Many years of work have culminated in a new point of departure.

For many Norwegians, the building where I have my office is loaded with symbols of a dark past. At Victoria terrasse in Oslo, the Gestapo maltreated prisoners with the utmost cruelty. Today, two storeys above the torture chambers in the cellar, you find the sections of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that deal with the promotion of human rights, peace, reconciliation and humanitarian affairs. The building has acquired a new soul.

Falstad, too, has acquired a new soul, due our democracy’s decision not to forget the dark chapters of our history, but to invest in knowledge that can protect us in the future. At Falstad, both the woods and the fjord still hold grim secrets. We do not know exactly how many people were killed in the woods. Even in death, the prisoners were deprived of their dignity and a decent burial.

In other places in the world, people are forced to deal with atrocities right now — face to face. They have to come to terms with their present.

Unfortunately, we are deluding ourselves when we say: “We will not allow this to happen again.” Our own times are full of place names that have a sombre ring to them: Darfur, Congo, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq and many others that for us remain unknown.

But from all of these, as well as from Falstad, we learn the same lesson: as a prisoner you are completely at the mercy of others. The stories of prisoners in any conflict are stories of helplessness, stories about how those in power treat the most vulnerable of all.

Taking prisoners is lawful. And it is a duty to prosecute those who are suspected of criminal actions or terror — in war as in peace.

But one thing must stand firm as a rock in our civilisation: nobody is beyond the law — and nobody is above the law. The right to humane treatment cannot be suspended. Nor can the prohibition against torture.

Every human being has the right to humane treatment. Nobody is to be dehumanised.

All those who were prisoners at Falstad and all those who today are prisoners at Guantanamo in Cuba, in prisons in Iraq or elsewhere — in all those places that have names that are unknown to us, but are filled with faces that are known to somebody — they have the right to humane treatment, to protection against abuse, against torture, against degrading and inhumane actions and punishment.

Cruelty and savagery are not linked to nationality, ethnicity, religion, sex or age. The wartime camps in North Norway known as the Serb camps are a reminder of this. The prison guards were Norwegian. Human beings were humiliated and tortured. The death rates were among the highest in prison camps in Norway. Norwegians also participated actively and enthusiastically in tracking down and deporting Norwegian Jews during the war. Henry Rinnan and his henchmen in Sonderabteilung Lola saw to it that hundreds of Norwegians were imprisoned — at Falstad and in other camps.

But at the same time, other Norwegians risked their lives to help prisoners of war all over Norway. At Falstad, local people smuggled food in to the prisoners, irrespective of the prisoners’ nationality, ethnicity or religion.

And let us remember this: we are speaking of man-made suffering. The holocaust was no natural disaster. Nor was Falstad. Such prison camps were built, and the necessary systems were set up and maintained.

But what is man-made, can also be changed by man. We must never accept becoming passive eye witnesses to human rights violations.

In Rwanda, Tutsis and opponents of ethnic cleansing were called “cockroaches”. They were not to be considered human. Therefore they had no right to be treated like anything more than insects. At Falstad, Jewish prisoners were forced to climb the trees and act like monkeys. This dehumanised them, making it possible to more effectively deprive them of their dignity.

Today, increasing international terrorism is making our globalised, interwoven world less safe. But the fight against terror may distort our sense of what is legal and what is possible. There are those who claim that this fight is so unique that is falls outside both national and international legal frameworks, and that those who are caught performing or who are suspected of participating in acts of terror have no rights whatsoever.

When I hear talk of prisoner treatment where the rights under the Geneva Conventions supposedly “do not apply”, I think of the faces at Falstad, the people who sat there, waiting to be transported into the woods to be executed. They were deprived of all rights and had no protection of any kind.

We are completely off course if we accept extrajudicial executions, if we accept people being denied basic rights when they are imprisoned or prosecuted.

The existing international and national legal standards and guarantees have been developed over a long period, precisely with the aim of preventing arbitrary treatment and protecting human life, health and dignity, irrespective of the crimes a person has or is suspected of having committed.

The Government is therefore working to ensure that those who are responsible for atrocities are brought to justice. Several of those responsible for the crimes in Srebrenica and Rwanda have been put on trial. Many of them are now in prison serving their sentences. Norway has contributed to achieving this, together with a number of other countries.

We have some very important instruments at our disposal today: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the body of international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions. Together, they codify the basic rights of the individual to integrity and dignity. These instruments act as shield between civilisation and barbarity.

Visiting Falstad always makes a deep impression on me. I see my own life in a longer perspective. And this is perhaps what Falstad is telling us: people’s lives fit into a longer perspective, into the history of mankind. In our mind’s eye we see the faces, the survivors, the first hand witnesses who have recounted and explained, about the suffering they went through and the developments in society that made it possible.

Both a memorial and human rights centre, Falstad is joining the threads of the past and future. Through education, documentation and research on the history of prisoners of war, humanitarian law and human rights, the centre aims to foster a critical, analytical, forward-looking approach and help to build a future where solidarity, human dignity and compassion strengthen their position as fundamental values — both in Norway and in the whole world.

Falstad is a place for remembering, for learning, for moving forward — wiser, more committed, better equipped. The only thing we can meaningfully say after experiencing an exhibition like Face to Face at Falstad is this: we will not forget. And more people must know.