Hi, my name is Ruben, and I am going to tell the contrasting story of two brothers during the second world war, my grandfather Willy and his brother Isidor. One managed to escape and survive, the other was arrested, deported to Auschwitz and murdered by the Nazis.

I’m going to tell you how the Holocaust started with anti-Jewish racism and led to the state sponsored genocide of 2/3rds of Europe’s Jews. What started with lies and wrongly blaming the Jews for everything that was wrong, was followed by gradually increasing restrictions on Jewish life, leading to the extermination of whole communities across Europe, including the tiny Jewish community in Norway from where Willy and Isidor came.

So let’s start with how they ended up in Norway. All four of my great-grandparents on my father’s side came originally from an area in the Russian Empire called Pale of Settlement, in what today is an area that stretches from Lithuania and Latvia in the north, through Belarus, Poland, Moldova and Russia to Ukraine in the south. This was a specific western region of the Russian Empire where Jews had been allowed to live. My great-grandparents Rebecca and Harry Rubinstein fled with many others, following the devastating waves of Pogroms targeting hundreds of Jewish communities and assaulting and killing thousands of Jews.

They met in Manchester and married in 1906, but moved to Norway’s capital Kristiania (which changed name to Oslo in 1925) a week after the wedding. There they had five children (born between 1907-13); Salomon “Solly”, Isidor, Elsa, Willy (my grandfather) and David.

Rebecca and Harry established “Londoner Basar”, which was inspired by Marks & Spencer’s successful Penny Bazaar on Cheetham Hill Road, and it proved a great success in Norway too. By 1915 they had made a small fortune, and could afford to move out to a large villa they called “Elsaborg” after their middle daughter, in the fashionable suburbs being developed along the tram line going up to Holmenkollen, the ski area overlooking Oslo. They had a live-in childminder, a gardener to tend the large garden and vegetable patch, and even a goat, who provided Willy goat milk for his weak heart.

The children grew up in a loving home, and with nature on their doorstep. They loved the outdoors and sports both in the warm summers and cold Norwegian winters. The family and some of the older children spent the summer holidays with family friends in Frankfurt in Germany, Isidor even stayed and went to boarding school there for almost 6 years. The whole family were active in the growing Jewish community, and when they wanted to build a synagogue in 1918, Harry was appointed chairman of the building committee, since he provided the money for most of the building works.

However, disaster struck the family when Harry (their father) died in 1931, and the business collapsed when they lost their savings. While grieving, the family had to sell the grand villa and they moved into a rented flat. Isidor came back from Frankfurt and two years travelling around Canada. He stayed for a while to help out and got a business degree, but then got restless finding it difficult to get a good job and left again looking for work in the US and in South Africa, even spending a season as a whaler in the Antarctic ocean.

The number of Jews who settled in Norway, like Willy and Isidor’s parents, following the Pogroms in Russia increased around the turn of the Century, but by 1910 the community still only counted less than 1,000 members. However, antisemitic attitudes in Norway and in Europe in general grew stronger.

In 1929 a new law was introduced by the Norwegian Parliament that banned the Jewish method of slaughter that still remains in place today. Parliament also adopted racial hygiene laws in 1934, a year before the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg Laws in Germany. These laws defined the “Nordic race” with their stereotypical tall, blonde and blue-eyed features, and imposed restrictions on unwanted “others”, including people with mental illnesses, Travelers and Jews.

Willy read and heard a lot about the situation in Germany, which was getting worse by the day, but the shocking events of the 9th November 1938, also known as Kristallnacht, made him realise that he needed to do something. In Germany 30,000 Jews had been attacked and hounded through the streets, then arrested and taken to concentration camps. Hundreds of synagogues and Jewish businesses were torched and plundered in country-wide riots. Jewish children were removed from all German schools, and Jews had to pay an extra 20% tax to pay for their own repairs.

In Norway, many Norwegians sympathised with the German Jews and believed that it could never happen in Norway. But at the same time, politicians and officials warned against allowing Jewish refugees entry to Norway, especially after the failed Evian conference in July 1938 had resulted in no country in the world accepting Jewish refugees. The US was limiting immigration, even turning away ships of refugees returning them to Europe where some of them were murdered by the Nazis. By 1939 the British were also limiting Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine.

Several humanitarian organisations were working desperately to assist the mainly Jewish refugees in the Nazi-occupied territories. Kindertransport was an organised rescue effort that managed to bring almost 10,000 Jewish children to the UK, and Nansen’s Aid rescued hundreds to Norway.

In February 1939, Willy flew to Berlin where he met with the last remaining member of the family-friends from Frankfurt. The other members of the family had managed to flee to London, but had had to give up all their valuables and belongings.

Willy, who was 27 at the time, was travelling on the train from Berlin to Hamburg, when German police raided it. To avoid drawing attention to himself, Willy tried to stuff the fur coat down the toilet, which was only a hole in the floor. It didn’t help and he was arrested. After a brief trial, he was sentenced to six months in jail in North Germany for attempted smuggling. His defence lawyer tried to appeal the sentence, but instead lost his licence to practise law because he was Jewish. Willy was released after completing his sentence on 28th August and made his way back by train to Copenhagen in Denmark, and then took the ferry to Oslo, where he arrived on 1st September - the day Germany invaded Poland and the war broke out.

Family, friends and members of the Jewish Youth Organisation welcomed Willy back on the pier in Oslo as a hero, with Norwegian flags and cheers of “Willy! Willy!”. They gathered in the evening to hear about Willy’s experience, and afterwards the men enjoyed cognac and cigars in one room and the women had liqueur and cigarettes in another. Willy was handed a tray of chocolates, which he took to the women and offered them on one condition: One chocolate, one kiss. After a round he declared: “The girl from Tønsberg kissed the best, so I’ll have to invite her on a date!”. He was referring to his future wife and my grandmother Ruth, who was better known as Lillemor.

Let’s hear from her (Video)

On the 9th of April 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Norway. The first wave of 10,000 German commandos on board the flagship Blücher, were tasked with capturing the Norwegian capital, the King and his government. However, Blücher was sunk at Oscarsborg Fortress, which was protecting the access to Oslo by sea, after being hit by two artillery rounds from the 50-year old guns, nicknamed Moses and Aron after the biblical leaders of the Jewish people, and a torpedo. This delay enabled the King, the Royal Family, and the Government with the Norwegian Gold Reserves to evacuate Oslo and flee northwards.

Isidor and Willy who were 31 and 28 at the time, immediately volunteered to the Norwegian army; Willy joined the Transport division, and they fought in the battles in Southern Norway. The German ground attack faced pockets of resistance in pursuit of the King and his Government until they could join up with British and French forces in the north. On the 7th June, The King and part of his government boarded HMS Glasgow and established a government in Exile from London. The Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square has been given every year since 1947, as a token of Norwegian gratitude to the people of the UK for their assistance during the war.

When the Nazis invaded Norway, they installed the leader of NS, the Norwegian Nazi party, as Minister President. One of his first acts was to ban Jews from entering Norway. They had already started to identify and list Jews back in 1938, and by the end of December 1941 the lists had been expanded and cross-referenced with Jewish organisations who had been ordered to provide membership lists. This information was used by the Police, local governors and the Justice Department to register Jewish-owned property and businesses.

Through 1940 and 1941 the situation for the Jews got worse; some Jews were arrested for political activity, all radios owned by Jews were confiscated and the synagogue in Trondheim was seized and vandalised. Miraculously, the Synagogue in Oslo was used as a storage facility, but remained largely untouched throughout the war. Jews’ identification papers were marked “J” and they were banned from practising medicine, accounting and law, including my grandfather Willy. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, Lillemor and Willy married in March 1941.

[Video]

On the 19th April 1941, Isidor was arrested together with five non-Jews. Initially it was Willy who had been arrested, and Isidor had the opportunity to flee, but he turned himself in and Willy was released. They were brutally interrogated and put on a trial that lasted five months for attempting to sail to England. The six defendants were each sentenced to 3½ years in jail and transferred from the Gestapo (Nazi German Secret Police) cells where they had been held during the trial to a prison camp north of Oslo.

Willy knew what a German prison meant and having attended the trial with Lillemor, they decided then that they had to get out of Norway as soon as possible. Sweden was still neutral and shared a long land border where a few resistance groups organised guides to take groups through the forests, avoiding German patrols. Willy contacted one of those groups in secret to arrange the trip. He buried silver goods and other valuables in the garden of the childminder who had worked for his parents. Then on the 15th November 1941, Willy fled around 100 km (60 miles) on skis across the border and then by train to Stockholm. After Willy had fled, Lillemor moved to her mother-in-law Rebecca’s apartment in Oslo, to also get ready to flee. She was told to start training for a long hike through thick forest.

On the 7th January 1942, three of the gang including Isidor were transported in chains to Akershus fortress by the port of Oslo. The other three were too ill and were taken to hospital, where one of them died. After 10 days in solitary confinement, Isidor and the other two were loaded onto a transport ship together with another 36 prisoners, which took them across the sea to Denmark. There they were loaded onto a train that took them to a prison camp near Hamburg, where Isidor had to glue up to 1,200 tiny paper bags of washing powder per day.

On the 5th June 1942, Lillemor asked her parents to come to Oslo to say goodbye, and she begged them to follow her to Sweden with her younger brother Emil (he was only 16). She took the train southeast from Oslo. A man on the train directed her to take a bus from the next stop to a farmhouse. From there she took a forest path, across a road teeming with German patrols.

She stayed at another farm overnight, and the next morning she crossed the border to Sweden with a small suitcase, wading through a stream. On the other side she was greeted with “Welcome to Sweden” (in Swedish), got food and drink, and was then registered as a refugee. Lillemor arrived in Stockholm late on 7th June, greeted by Willy, who had been waiting for her at the station all day, with carnations that had seen better days.

On the 26th October 1942, Norwegian police came to arrest all the male Jews. Willy and Isidor’s younger brother David had fled in September. Only Lillemor’s brother, Emil was at their home when the police came knocking. The father Benjamin and brother Julius (20) were in Oslo and were arrested there, after they had decided that they couldn’t leave Emil on his own while they fled to Sweden. Benjamin, Julius and Emil were sent to a detention camp and the women were instructed to report to the local police station every day.

A month later, in the early morning of 26th November, the police came to arrest the women and children too. Lillemor’s sister Gitel managed to escape by her mother kicking her out the back door when the police came to arrest them. She managed to flee and went into hiding in a local hospital where a friendly doctor admitted her and protected her from those looking for her.

The mother, Ida, was ordered to board the bus with 20 other Jewish “passengers”, including members of Benjamin’s extended family. The bus arrived in the afternoon at Pier 1 in Oslo harbour, where they met hundreds of other Jews, including the men who had been arrested the month before.

That day, Norwegian police under direction of the Gestapo handed over 576 Jewish men, women and children to the SS at the harbour where they were forced onto the transport ships Donau and Monte Rosa. The SS or Schutzstaffel was the paramilitary organisation that was most responsible for the systematic and industrial murder of Jews. In total 767, or just over a third of the registered Jews would be deported this way.

After a couple of days sailing through rough weather, the Donau docked in Stettin in what is today Northern Poland. Here the Jews were stuffed onto cattle trains with standing-room only and they arrived in Auschwitz II - Birkenau in the evening of 1st December. There the children, women and elderly including Ida and Benjamin were separated and taken directly to the gas chambers where they were murdered within hours of arrival. Birkenau was an extermination camp where gas chambers had been built by 1944 to kill up to 10,000 people per day. 1.1m people were murdered there; 960k Jews and of them 865k on arrival.

Julius and Emil were sent to Auschwitz III - Monowitz, which was the labour camp for the chemical company IG Farben. They didn’t survive the inhumane conditions there and both died within two months of arriving from exhaustion and frost.

After the reunion with Willy in Stockholm, Lillemor started working for the Norwegian resistance, managing a covert apartment and making sure that the constant stream of agents had everything they needed.

Unable to find a satisfactory position himself, Willy got a pass to fly to England on 8th April 1943, where the Norwegian authorities in London sent him to Scotland to join the forces preparing to retake Norway. This was much to Lillemor’s annoyance and frustration as she was 9 months pregnant! Willy wasn’t much soldier-material, he had problems with his wrists, and was often sent to London for treatment and rehabilitation, where he was also hoping to get legal work for the Norwegian Government in Exile.

Lillemor gave birth to my father on 26th April 1943, but with little social security for refugees, she struggled with money and accommodation. After a couple of months, Willy started to send money back to Lillemor and she started receiving support from the Norwegian army.

Lillemor and Willy sent almost 200 letters and many telegrams to each other over the next 2½ years, each (avg.) 4-page letter often having to go through Swedish, Norwegian and UK censorship. They shared their feelings of being apart, commented on the news, and talked about movies they went to see. Lillemor also kept a diary, where she jotted down her own thoughts and comments, and held imaginary conversations with her son (my father).

Isidor wrote 10 letters to his mother Rebecca from prison in North Germany in response to the letters he received from her in Sweden. In one letter Isidor congratulated her on the birth of her grandchild (my father). After over a year, Isidor was transferred to Auschwitz III Monowitz on 12th May 1943. His crime had been upgraded to “being Jewish”, while the others returned to Norway.

As the allies advanced from the West and the Red Army from the East, the German SS ordered the destruction of the evidence of atrocities that they had committed. Isidor survived the extreme conditions for 18 months, where the slaves died on average within 2-3 months of arriving. On 18th January 1945, Isidor was ordered, together with around 65,000 remaining prisoners, on what became known as the Death March from Auschwitz.

[Video]

After two months of marching and being transported by train from camp to camp, he was murdered by an SS officer on 27th March after asking for water. We know this because in a witness statement provided by a fellow Norwegian Jew, who met Isidor on the cattle train to the last concentration camps. He managed to escape and told the approaching American troops where Isidor’s body was, they found him and buried him. His remains were repatriated in 1950 and buried in the Jewish cemetery in Oslo.

Just over a month later, the Germans capitulated in Norway on 8th May 1945, but instead of returning to Stockholm or Oslo, Willy was sent to Bergen (on the west coast of Norway) to administer the military hardware depots left behind.

Only 26 survivors from the concentration camps and around 500 of those who fled returned to rebuild the Jewish Community in Norway after the war. It was not until 1999 (over 50 years after the war) that they received proper individual and communal compensation, including funds to sustain the Jewish Community in Norway and to form a national museum for tolerance.

Today there are around 1,500 Jews in Norway, still well below the 2,173 listed in 1942. The rise of antisemitism is again causing fear in the community, worried that the Government, who have been very hostile to Israel, are ignoring the threats. The synagogues and Jewish cemetery have been vandalised and shot at, and antisemitic language in media and the arts are becoming more common.

Lillemor was granted a visa to Norway for a week in June, travelling on trains for military personnel to Bergen to meet Willy. Lillemor, young Harry and Willy finally reunited in Oslo 10th December 1945. In January she went back to her hometown Tønsberg where she met her brother Charles and they went around with a police officer to places they suspected had stolen or auctioned goods. They recovered many items, either because Charles as a child had marked everything with his initials (CK) in thick black marker pen, or due to the police local knowledge and auction lists from 1942-43.

From Willy and Lillemor’s families;

• One parent (Harry) died before the war, two (Ida & Benjamin) were murdered in Auschwitz and one (Rebecca) survived

• Of the ten siblings in both families, one (Salomon) emigrated to South Africa before the war, three (Julius, Emil & Isidor) were murdered and six (Elsa, Willy, David, Charles, Gitel & Lillemor) fled to Sweden and England where they survived

• Three of the seven surviving siblings had in total five children (including my father), six grandchildren (including me) and ten great-grandchildren (including my children). Only two children, two grand-children and four great-grandchildren live in Norway today, the rest live in South Africa, Israel and the UK

The antisemitism that grew in Norway in the years leading up to the Holocaust offers important lessons about prejudice, responsibility, and the dangers of indifference. Back then, negative stereotypes about Jewish people were spread widely, creating a culture of mistrust and "othering." Although Norway’s Jewish community was small, the prejudice they faced paved the way for many Norwegians to turn a blind eye—or even assist—when the Nazis began persecuting Jews during World War II. This period reminds us that harmful beliefs, even when subtly expressed or directed toward small groups, can lead to devastating outcomes if left unchecked.

Today, we see similar biases and misinformation targeting various communities around the world. Just as those in Norway could have spoken up against the prejudice they saw, we too can choose to challenge discrimination, advocate for fair treatment, and support those targeted by hate. Recognising the impact of prejudice, no matter how small, helps us build a more inclusive and aware society that resists the cycles of hate that history warns us about.

Let Lillemor have the final word and warning

[Video]