"UNPREPARED"

Evening Star, Issue 23729, 9 November 1940, Page 4

"UNPREPARED"

SIGRID UNDSET WARNS U.S.A. Sigrid Dndset, the famous Norwegian novelist, whose son was killed in action against the Germans, recently reached San Francisco from Japan, having travelled halfway round the world as a refugee from the Nazi occupation. This ns part of an interview in the ‘ New York. Times.’ “ Nothing was left to me in Norway,” she said slowly. “ I had no liberty of thought. So I came away, hoping to be of some use elsewhere.” Precisely what she will do in the United States, Mme Undset has no idea. “ I can only tell how it was in Norway,” she said. “ I can only try to warn Americans against feeling too safe.” She closed her eyes for a moment, and then went on. “ The tragedy of ray Norway was that we were the freest people on earth. We took our democracy for granted. 11 We knew there were ' traitors abroad, wandering over our countryside. But we thought they wore silly. We poked fun at them, at the Quislings, at the wandervogel—the German student hikers in their short trousers. They constituted an alien phenomenon that we never considered seriously. AND THEN— So when the war came we were unprepared. And that is what will happen to Amercia, only on a larger scale. You will fight for your democracy only when forced to do so by invasion, and then it will be too late. “ I do not know what the future will bring to the world. I can see no end to this hell. It will go on for a long time. Nations are silenced by terror. Then the children are corrupted in the schools, and when that happens survival is dubious.” Mme Undset learned first of the capitulation of Franco while travelling from Norway to Japan over the transSiberian railway. “ That was the worst blow of every thing,’ ’ she said. “ France always was the brains of Europe. If she is smashed permanently, I fear it will .be the end of Europe. We had, something,. England had something. But France had everything. “ 1 love England,” she said. “ Next to Norway I love England. And I know she must have help. “ The English are something like the Norwegians. They are too optimistic. That has been our undoing. “ When my eldest son was studying engineering in England he tried to tell his classmates what was happening in Germany. Ho tried to explain how young men fainted from ecstasy when they came in contact with Hitler.”