Their fishing boat, the Brattholm, carried a secret cargo of bombs and explosive devices. 0 references. In the now abandoned Haugland farm on the island of Hersya, Jan Baalsrud was given shelter and food for the first time. Jan then survived an avalanche and had frostbite along with snow blindness. A small museum in Furuflaten commemorates Baalsrud. Unfortunately, Hitler had different plans. He jokingly dubbed the shed his Hotel Savoy, after the world-renowned luxury hotel in London. At the top of the ridge, Haug says, there is a large boulder about five metres high, six metres wide and flat on one side. www.opendialoguemediations.com. We therefore travelled around the Lyngenfjord to see where it all happened. He wandered in a snowstorm for three days. Baalsrud was a 25-year-old son of an instrument maker who escaped his country after the German invasion in 1940 and returned three years later as a saboteur. Over the next nine weeks, Baalsrud was the subject of a nationwide manhunt by the Germans. What happened over those nine weeks remains one of the wildest, most unfathomable survival stories of World War II. Baalsrud's assignment was to swim underwater and fasten some of the explosive devices limpets, or magnetic bombs to seaplanes in order to sink them. His ultimate goal was to cross the border into Sweden, where he'd have a better chance of escaping to an allied nation until the search was called off. Consider the following code: grades = [ "A", "A", "B" ] print (grades [0]) The value at the index position 0 is A. The 12th Man is the story of Jan Baalsrud, a Norwegian resistance fighter, one of a dozen saboteurs trained by British intelligence to carry out a raid on an air traffic control tower in the . And there is a replica of the sled that transported Baalsrud, with a mannequin of Baalsrud himself lying on top. Their son Are recalls standing with Baalsrud outside their house, next to the barn where he once hid for days. Rune og Ronny fr kjenne p de samme utfordringene som Baalsrud hadde. From then on, he was passed among families, reliant on kindness and goodwill. Are, who has an uncanny resemblance to the pictures I saw of his father, works in the local fish-feed industry. Etter den annen verdenskrig var Baalsrud virksom for krigsinvalidenes sak. He died in Norway, however. Due to weather and German patrols in the town of Manndalen, Kfjord, he was there for 27 days and was close to death for lack of food. Suffering from snowblindness and frostbite, more than sixty people of the Troms District risk their lives to help Baalsrud to freedom. Marius came to visit and meant to come back again, but a storm delayed him for another five days. After Germany took hold of Norway, the countrys politicians, royalty, and many civilians fled to safer countries. The morning after their blunder, on 29 March, their fishing boat Brattholm containing around 100 kilograms of explosives intended to destroy the air control tower was attacked by a German vessel. page after page, the twists and . "My intention was to honour all his helpers," Haug tells me, "because that was what Jan wanted.". However, as was also true of other legendary wartime survivors, he was not content to live this sedentary life while his countrymen were still fighting. He fully amputated one of his big toes and sliced the dead flesh off the tips of several others. [4], A street in Kolbotn, Norway is named Jan Baalsruds plass (Jan Baalsrud's Place) in his honor. The men lit a fuse, waiting until the last minute to jump before the Brattholm exploded. By now, Baalruds fortitude had made him a symbol of Norwegian resistance, and the occupying Nazi army redoubled its efforts to capture him. There are Baalsrud's wooden skis, recovered by a local resident in the bottom of the valley in the summer of 1943 and hidden until the end of the war. Somehow, he had managed to retain his handgun, a small Colt still firmly in its holster. His story lives on through films such as Nine Lives (1957) and The 12th Man (2017), as well as books, TV documentaries, and a remembrance march that takes place every year in Troms, Norway. The country would remain under their control until 1945. Only he had managed to escape and he would certainly be killed if caught. So, they coordinated to transport him to another island first on a concealed stretcher, then on an improvised sled, and finally in a rowboat across the fjord. Jovelyn ("Evie") Miller (1.1.1925-15.5.1963) var Jan Baalsruds frste kone. Every year at the end of July, the Jan Baalsrud March takes place. Today, there is no evidence to indicate what happened here, but many people have written in the notebook which is used as a visitors book. He spent the last several weeks tied on a stretcher, near death, as teams of Norwegian villagers dragged him up and down hills and snowy mountains.[1]. This is where Baalsrud's story loses all recognisable shape. Then he returned to his old life, outside Oslo. The captain cuts the motor. Source: Flickr.com/trondheim_byarkiv (CC BY 2.0). Source: Anders Beer Wilse / Galleri NOR. The final operative, Jan Baalsrud, was able to evade capture. Jan Sigurd Baalsrud, 1917 - 1988 Jan Sigurd Baalsrud was born on month day 1917, at birth place, to Nils Julius Baalsrud and Hansine "Lilla" Baalsrud. He was a Second Lieutenant (Fenrik). It is almost impossible to imagine how a man with frostbite could have survived here for three weeks. jan baalsrud wifehorse heaven hills road conditionshorse heaven hills road conditions ON THE DRIVE TO REVDAL, Haug tells me that he wants me to experience the "Hotel Savoy" alone to leave me there for several minutes in silence so I can imagine what it must have been like to stay in there, day after day, expecting Marius and his friends to come, but them never coming, to be experiencing incredible pain from gangrene, to start to think that this would be the place where he would die. Their heroism, like Baalsrud's, was of an ambiguous kind, and Howarth's question occurred to me again. He made it to an arctic village, nearing death. Two special soldiers relives Jan Baalsrud's miraculous flight from the Nazi's during harsh winter, when he survived and after the war became famous as the man with nine lives, known through the films Nine Lives (1957) and 12th Man (2017). The boat was discovered; three of them were shot and eight arrested and later executed in Troms. After escaping the Nazi occupation of Norway in 1940, he had just returned, alongside 11 compatriots, as part of a sabotage. Despite this, she described his sensitivity, courtesy, and grateful attitude towards her family as they helped him. Village residents hid him in a barn in hopes that he would recover, but the frostbite on his feet had progressed to the point that he could no longer walk. Their daughter, Liv, told Haug that her father never wanted to talk about what had happened in the fjords. "He wondered, 'If Marius is caught, who should help me?' Were sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. He graduated as a cartographical instrument-maker in 1939. Smurfette Principle: Three female actors, with Agnes (Henny Moan) getting most of the attention. Jan Baalsrud was born in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway and moved with his family to Kolbotn in the early 1930s. An ambulance plane took him to Oslo University Hospital, but it was too late. Unknown Binding. The march takes eight days and you can do either all of the march or just part of it. And that is just the beginning. Specifically: His ashes are buried in Manndalen in a grave shared with Aslak Aslaksen Fossvoll (1900-1943), one of the local men who helped him escape to Sweden. Barely alive, he continued to resist. The members of Kompani Linge made the difficult choice to blow up their own boat rather than hand it over. Please try again later. Another warded off a German soldier while keeping him hidden, and a midwife offered to disguise him as a woman in labor. An elegant pedestrian bridge has been constructed across the river, almost at the end of the trial. William Butler, 60, and his wife Simone, 52, were on their boat off the . The house belonged to the sister of Marius Gronvoll, an active member of the resistance. But in a cruel twist of fate, he ended up speaking to a shopkeeper with the same name some reports indicate he may have been a German imposter. richard matvichuk wife. Climbing ashore, he heard gunfire, glanced backward and saw his friend on the ground, blood rushing from his head. The churchyard in Manndalen is situated in the heart of the village, while the trip to Baalsrudhula starts from the summer dwelling in the Manndalen valley, which is where the road ends at the top of the valley. Over the course of a few months, Jan Baalsrud (Thomas Gullestad) survives the harshest weather of the Arctic Circle as he flees a cruel and relentless German soldier, Kurt Stage (Jonathan Rhys. So, in April 1940, the Blitzkrieg came to Norway. We will update Jan Baalsrud's Height, weight, Body Measurements, Eye Color, Hair Color, Shoe & Dress size soon as possible. Five days later when the storm had abated, the villagers crossed the fjord again and carried Baalsrud further into the mountains. He was weakening by the day, in the grip of starvation and reliant on the goodwill of others. Norwegian Independent Company 1 was one such unit, and is better known as Kompani Linge after its leader, Captain Martin Linge. Baalsrud barely survived. He kept trying; it kept jamming. She remembers the sound of machine-gun fire outside her window. Jan had 2 siblings. Before he died on December 30, 1988, he was moved to a rehabilitation centre near Oslo that his own donations and support had helped to create. As of 2018 Jan Baalsrud is 71 years (age at death) years old. By the time a group of Sami, Norway's indigenous people, came to take him across the border, Baalsrud weighed just 36 kilograms. Out of Print--Limited Availability. It houses a few of his recovered possessions, including his skis which were found in 1943 at the bottom of a gully, and hidden until the end of the war. A British army infantryman during the WWII who sported one of the most luxurious mustaches in military history. A team of helpers finally found him again, taking him further south to the Skaidijonni Valley, where he would spend another 17 days in a cave, awaiting another team to transport him across the Swedish border. His ashes are buried in Manndalen, in a grave shared with Aslak Aslaksen Fossvoll (19001943), one of the local men who helped him escape to Sweden. . He evaded capture for approximately two months, suffering from frostbite and snow blindness. In addition, he was chairman of the Norwegian Disabled Veterans Union from 1957 to 1964. BAALSRUD HIMSELF REJECTED that myth, time and again. On the fourth day, he found his way to a small village called Furuflaten. From Mikkelvik/Mariagrden, a ferry sails to Bromnes on the island of Rebbenesya. F r senere dd ogs " Evie ". From there, the route zigzags south 130 kilometres up and down mountains and across rivers, concluding at last at the border Norway shares with Sweden and Finland. But then the old soldier grinned grimly, gritting his teeth, and glanced at Are. Alle var motstandsmenn fr m/k Brattholm I som blei pteken i Toftefjord 30. mars. The Jan Baalsrud March. Someone in the next village alerted the Germans within a day of the team's arrival. Worse, he didnt have a plan. A few framed black-and-white photos of Baalsrud's earlier visit in the 1950s, during production of Ni Liv, hang on the wall of the parlour. Virtual International Authority File. Den 12. mann forteller den dramatiske historien om Jan Baalsruds flukt fra nazistene under andre verdenskrig. Baalsrud looked the 10-year-old girl squarely in the eye and declared that if she ever told a soul that shed seen him, everyone she loved would almost certainly be killed. During his weeks there, Baalsrud completed the amputation of the rest of his toes. In peacetime, Baalsrud was made an MBE, and raised a family with his American wife, Evie, while working in his father's import business. Jan married Jovelyn Evy, Miller Baalsrud in 1951, at age 33. "She said afterward that he was in such bad shape that it would have been better if he was dead than still alive," her son Dag says.