06-16 Holocaust and Resistance Museums Oslo

Walked to The Royal Palace and we talked to one of the guards to see if the Palace would be open today. Online we could only see guided tour tickets available from June 24th onward. A nice lady walks up as the guard is trying to explain. She thinks we are too early for tours - the tours don't start until later this month. It's closed for the entire time we are here.

It's drizzling out, so we locate a tram that will take us to the train station. At the NSB ticket counter we pick up our train tickets for a couple of train trips that we are taking next week - from Oslo to Skien and Skien back to Oslo - that we bought online before we left Seattle.

All of this work has made us hungry, so we had lunch upstairs in the station.

Bus 30 will take us back to the Bygdoy Peninsula. We got on a bus to take us out to the  Holocaust Museum (Norwegian Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities). If you are thinking about going, don't bother. If you know anything about the holocaust, you will not learn anything more here. All we learned was at the time there were 2,100 Jewish people in Norway. Of the nearly 800 that were deported to Germany, only 25 returned to Sweden. It's not explained or presented in an interesting way.

We take the ferry back to town, because we want to go to the Norwegian Resistance Museum that is inside the Akershus Castle. It's been raining all day today, not hard, just a sprinkle.

The Norway Resistance Museum tells the story of Norwegian resistance efforts in a nice, easily understood linear way.

Occupation of Norway started in June of 1940 and lasted until May of 1945. Similar to what we learned in the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, there were local collaborators, resistance fighters, those that helped the Jews escape the death camps, and pacifists who just went about their own business.

When the "resistance" consisted of violence against the occupying Germans, the Germans usually ended up killing innocent citizens.

The Germans took control of the newspapers so there was an underground paper.

Radios were confiscated because the Germans didn't want the Norwegians listening to news from England via BBC. So radios were smuggled in and crude antennas were created to bring in those broadcasts.

In the latter stages of the war there was coordination between England, the US and the Resistance to the point that the US told them that we were gong to soon beat Germany and that the most important thing the Resistance could do would be to protect Norwegian property from being destroyed by the Germans as they left the country.

The displays and information were presented in a way that just made you want to keep reading and stay until the end of the story.

We eat dinner at a burger place on the way home and stopped for water and ice cream at the store.

Tonight we went up to the roof to check out the roof top view. We can see over to the Fram Museum across the water, into apartment buildings around us, and up the hill to the ski jump.