Stories from the War

We know many people who were children during World War II. One person who experienced the war as a child is a Sami woman we know.
She told us about the Nazis who were in her village. One of the Nazi officers was a professor who took lots of pictures of them; he photographed them face on, and took profile shots, then he measured their heads in all directions. The little girls thought he was a very strange man because one Sunday they got dressed up in their best clothes and went to visit him and explained that now he could take their picture if he wanted. They pointed to his camera and tried to explain to him, but he did not respond. In return the little girls decided that they would never let him photograph them again. The next time he came to their house with his camera and all the other strange stuff he had dangling around his neck, the two little girls ran and hid under the stabur, (a storage house for food).
He also had big dogs which he brought with him when he came to look for an escaped prisoner. The children had seen how he had taken a prisoner whose hands were tightly and painfully tied up. This man was was taken away to another unknown place by soldiers. Because of this the children were afraid of the professor.
The Sami people were also in danger of being exterminated by the Nazis. Our friend's 4 older siblings (2 brothers and 2 sisters) were all called in by the Nazis to serve in the army. One by one they silently disappeared, first the older brother, then a few months later the younger brother, after a little while the sisters silently vanished without a word of explanation. Somehow everybody "knew" that they'd escaped to Sweden, but the explanation the parents gave to the authorities who came to conscript the children was that they were in the mountains with the reindeer. The officers did not believe them and the parents were arrested for a week. During this time the professor was away, but when he returned he backed up the parent's story of the children's whereabouts. So he wasn't all bad, says our friend.
When the war was over she was 10 years old. At that time it was not common for the Sami to learn to read. The Sami have their own language and did not speak Norwegian. Neither her grandparents nor her parents had learned to read. When she left home for boarding school for the first time her older sister was full of good advice:
First the teacher will ask you what your name is, you have to tell him your name, then he will ask you how old you are, then you have to say this, and he will ask you if you are glad to be at school, you have to tell him yes.
A teacher meet the students when they arrived to the large 2 story building. It was the first time the little girl had ever seen such a big house. As they walked along to the school the teacher began to talk to the little girl who walked along in between the teacher and her big sister. The first question was a different one than the poor little girl had been expecting, and since she did not understand Norwegian she told him what her name was. He sister poked her and said, oh how stupid you are! The conversation continued in this way, and her big sister kept poking her and telling her she was doing it all wrong. Our little friend was crushed and ran to find a place to hide where she cried and cried and imagined that the teacher was telling all the other students about the very stupid little girl who had arrived at their school. Finally a cleaning lady who was Sami came and spoke to the little girl and comforted her.
Her first year in school she learned to parrot the texts because a schoolmate who she shared a room with taught her to memorize the words on the page. The next year she was not sent to school, but the year after that there was a place for her in school and this time they had a young teacher who also was Sami, and he explained the words to her in Sami. Then she began to learn and loved school and when school was over she cried because there was so much more she wanted to learn.