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“In this stunning memoir, which is also very much a work of history, Anne-Marie Foltz tells the astonishing story of her family’s displacement and survival from World War II Norway. Memory can be a tumultuous, mysterious, often hidden storehouse with no keys to open it. In adulthood Foltz finally found the right questions that unlocked her parents’ theretofore silent and conflicting memories of how and why they left the Nazi Holocaust in Norway.
The parents, Lova and David Abrahamsen, he, a distinguished psychiatrist and author, targeted by the Nazis and she, an extraordinarily courageous woman and mother of two daughters, saved their treasure trove of letters. David fled by ship to America, hoping the family could later reunite. During the winter 1940–1941, Lova, saved her life and the lives of her daughters in an epic trek from Norway to Sweden to Moscow, across the Soviet Union to Japan, by ship to Hawaii and San Francisco.
In their rich surviving letters both Lova and David use the word “unbelievable” to describe their realization that they will once again reunite, that a family can survive the most evil of forces. This story is almost unbelievable, except that we as readers are swept along on a well-documented odyssey that might have been ship-wrecked at any time. At once, a work of retrieval, history, personal revelation, Jewish consciousness, and wonderful storytelling, this book reminds us brilliantly that we are our pasts, as well as the presents and futures we make out of them.
This is a book about loss, but also renewal and the universal meaning of why life matters. Foltz has written a brave and compelling book. ”
—David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University,author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
“This spellbinding author tells the tale of her extraordinary Jewish family’s fraught flight from Norway after the gunfire of the Nazi invasion in 1940. The scarlet thread is the passionately moving love story of her parents, told posthumously through their letters from their struggling, pained separations to their settlement in New York where he becomes a well-known psychoanalytic forensic psychiatrist and writer, she, as a philanthropic supporter of cultural causes and both daughters established and productive.
Anne-Marie Foltz eloquently takes us on her risky discovery mission—later into a first-person present and even into her research to resolve a post war family mystery in contemporary Norway. This is a compelling, well-researched towering story over two generations from Poland and Lithuania to Norway, Sweden and the USA and how all the lives even flourished with richness, yet they continued to bear the searing scars of being hounded by Hitler and anti-Semitism—revealed here graphically, even in Scandinavia.”
—Rosemary H. Balsam, MD, Yale Medical School,
winner 2018 Sigourney Award for Psychoanalytic Advancement
“A story of resilience, courage, and love –a story about the cost on the individual of Nazi occupation in a small country beyond the main theaters of war.”
—Bernt Hagtvet, Professor of Political Science, University of Oslo; Adjunct Professor, Bjørknes U. College, Oslo
Anne-Marie Foltz was born in Oslo, Norway. After receiving a MPH and PhD from Yale, she taught at Yale, Wesleyan, and New York Universities, and consulted for health programs on the African continent. She is the author of An Ounce of Prevention: Child Health Politics Under Medicaid.
Survival Skills By Anne-Marie Foltz
Table of Contents
Introduction: Time Future
Part I: Time Past
The First Emigration: Leaving Lithuania and Poland
Lova and David in Norway and Sweden
Anti-Semitism and the rise of Hitler in Germany
Refugees and “Peace in our time”
Part II: Time Present
April 9th,1940
Battle for Southern Norway
The Second Emigration: Leaving German-occupied Norway
Sweden
David in the United States
Leaving Sweden
Journey across Russia, Siberia and Japan
Joliet, Illinois
Kew Gardens, New York
Topeka Kansas and Kew Gardens
Lake Muskoka, Canada
Manhattan
1950: Return to Norway
Part III: Time Future
1971: Return to Norway
1993: David’s 90th birthday
1996: Lova
1997: Abrahamsen Reunion, Trondheim
Norway’s Restitution Debate
The Last Years
Lost to Norway
Epilogue: Was Uncle Heiman a Traitor?
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
