01:26

Ruth Deutschmann

Benjamin Epp

Wien

2008-06-13

Sylvia Manning ? Baumgartner

1944

After about 14 days we were back in Norway. The main reception camp was there. We had to wait there for the troops who had marched across the whole of the North Cape. This took almost two months. They had orders to burn down all the houses - all the Norwegian houses, which potentially could have provided shelter for the Russians. Burn everything! And what about the families that lived there? It isn't like here, where there's a house every 500 metres. There, there are four or five houses in one village, and the next village is 50 kilometres away - again with a few houses. And nothing in between! And so the people had to ? I saw it many times myself marching past. They kicked the people out of a beautiful one-storey house, about 25 people, one woman was heavily pregnant. They drove everybody out - the house had to be burned down - petrol poured around it and set on fire. And there they stood - in the winter, in the snow. Those were gruesome times.