I was sitting in our apartment in Glendale, California, but I may as well have been on another planet that day in 1993.
My grandmother, helping me with a sixth-grade report, was vividly recalling the depredations of the Nazi occupation of Norway during World War II: the rationed bread filled with sawdust, the teachers disappeared from their classrooms, the tantrum she threw on a train to thwart her older sister’s arrest by a German officer.
Decades after the war, these details came to her with riveting clarity, even though she was barely a teenager when the occupation ended in May 1945.
