Gift #3 Nelly Langholm
Ships and marine life provide bookends to important chapters in Nelly Langholm’s life, surrounding years of horror. Arrested in Norway in 1942, she was a prisoner on board the ship Monte Rosa enroute to Ravensbrück.
She remained silent for “almost 50 years before I talked to anyone about the experiences.” Yet, the atrocities she witnessed and endured are clear. A teen-ager with a crush on someone who
“said his name was Wolfgang Grimm and he had come to see me.
I didn’t know why and he wouldn’t say.
But he talked to me and he was so lovely and sweet and played the piano.
And he came back the next day. And the next day.
And I fell in love with him.”[1]
After her uncle was killed by a German explosive and losing a cousin to the Nazi police, Nellie did what young adults do: she wrote a “Dear Wolfgang” letter, ending the infatuation.
“The next day the Gestapo came to my house and arrested me.
They told me they had read the letter in which I said I was an enemy of Germany.”
Imprisoned for nine months in two Norwegian transit camps, she arrived in Ravensbrück on June 2, 1943.
Being so young, she probably did not understand the larger picture of a world-at-war. Being arrested
“felt right in a way; I had done this terrible thing by fallen in love with a German and the Germans had killed our family.
I thought I should be punished.’
Images from this undeserved ‘punishment’ include:
- Witness: German shepherd guard dogs mauling a 15-year-old Yugoslavian girl to
- Memory: When lucky enough to have underwear, it was verboten to wash
- Witness: starvation rations resulting in massive weight
- Memory: “I was so greedy that I ate a large piece of pork without sharing I became very ill afterwards” because her system was shutting down.
- Witness: the relative excitement when an all-too-meager Red Cross package managed to get through to prisoners, minus whatever the Nazi guards secreted away.
- Witness: “Christmas and New Year’s days in 1943.
On Christmas eve, we were sent out of the barracks in the evening and dressed stark naked for de-lice.
We stood for many hours while the snow came down. To keep warm, we stood close together.”[2]
- Memory: Norwegian prisoners would disappear in the “Night and the Fog” (see 3rd paragraph of Lise Borsum, Gift #4).
- Witness: Prisoners about to be executed were so thirsty that they threw themselves into little puddles to try to drink the murky moisture.
- Memory: “crying with ”[3]
- Memory: Sewing and hard physical labor in horrific
- Memory: Suffering from tuberculosis, Nelly was saved by the White Buses on April 9.
After the war, she reconnected with, and married, a Norwegian journalist who had also been a prisoner; they had three children.
Nelly never forgot the Red Cross parcels while a prisoner in Ravensbrück and those heroes of the Swedish Red Cross and the White Buses.
“This made me make an important choice; I was to spend part of my life working for the Red Cross.”[4]
And she did. After training at a Red Cross nursing school, she staffed an emergency room in Oslo; in 1971 she became a psychiatric nurse.
Several years later, Nelly landed “the dream job as a cruise nurse on «Sagafjord», on what was then the world’s finest cruise ship.”19
Later, in her mid-50s, she became a nurse in the North Sea working on oil rigs and supply ships.
She was also honored to christen an oil company support vessel for Mobil Oil in June 1985 in honor of her service on the «Statfjord A».
Once imprisoned and transported by ship into Hell, Nelly Langholm’s life voyage included service on land and on the sea helping others.
[1] https://www.aftenbladet.no/magasin/i/Ra0J2/menneskeliv-var-ikke-mye-verdt
[2] https://www.aftenbladet.no/magasin/i/Ra0J2/menneskeliv-var-ikke-mye-verdt
[3] ftenblad.no. Op.cit.
[4] https://full-english-books.net/english-books/full-book-if-this-is-a-woman-inside-ravensbruck-hitlers-concentration-camp-for-women-read-online-chapter-116
