Memoir & 2023 Summer Planning
Six months is a long time between blog posts. After my return from my 9 weeks abroad, regular life took hold. The last big piece of news I wrote about was that I fortunately and unfortunately found Thor’s death record - fortunately, because I knew it existed but unfortunately because his cause of death box was blank. (see the August 26, 2022 post).
Last year I also finally received proof of Thor’s participation in the Norwegian resistance. I have written several posts about this but after discovering an abbreviated list of names of bank employees that were called into the bank in the early morning hours of April 9, 1941, by Nicolas Rygg, I knew I had a new perspective on Thor and his willingness to be a part of the resistance. And of course, I now had a reason as to why he might have taken the job in Hammerfest.
There is a Norwegian-language video about the gold transport exhibition that was shown at the Historisk Museum (with subtitles Historisk Museum, Oslo). See more information about this exhibit in the July 17 post. However, it took until September 2022 to finally get the full list of bank employees and how they were partnered up. Thor was paired with Erling F. Henriksen (not Trygve Amdahl as I had previously thought).
My current plan is to travel back to Oslo for the summer. It is a place that feels like home to me - a place where I can feel free, myself, and connected to my heritage in both tangible and intangible ways. Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey seems an integral part of this multi-year exploration for me into the life of my great-uncle, a person I have never met, yet with whom I feel inextricably linked.
“Follow your bliss.
If you do follow your bliss,
you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you,
and the life you ought to be living
is the one you are living.
When you can see that,
you begin to meet people
who are in the field of your bliss,
and they open the doors to you.
I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid,
and doors will open
where you didn't know they were going to be.
If you follow your bliss,
doors will open for you that wouldn't have opened for anyone else.”
― Joseph Campbell
