Gestapo

The Gestapo appears in the family history as the force that shot one of the narrator’s maternal uncles during an attempted escape from a police station on the south coast in 1943. The brief reference makes the organization’s violence a defining fact in the story of two twin brothers and in the family’s later circumstances.

The 1943 shooting

The narrator’s uncles had stayed together through school, cross-country skiing, and hunting. During an attempt to escape from a police station, one twin was shot by the Gestapo. The account does not provide further details about the escape attempt or the circumstances of the shooting; it establishes the killing as the rupture that left the other twin, Uncle Amund, alive without his closest companion.

Consequences in the family narrative

The surviving brother continued to live in the flat in Vålerenga that he had shared with his twin, and the narrator describes him as a lonely hunter. Years later, the narrator’s mother borrowed money from him to travel to Karlstad and claim the money due for timber. The Gestapo is not otherwise described in the passage, but the reference to its violence remains present in this later family history: a wartime shooting has divided the twins’ lives, and the surviving brother’s continuing place in the family becomes material as well as emotional.