He was placed in an orphanage in Sweden

In 2020, it will be 75 years since the end of the war, and in that sense TV 2 was allowed to participate when Crown Prince Haakon took the Refugee Route this summer.

Watch the exclusive interview with the future King of Norway in the TV 2 Sumo documentary “On a Journey with the Crown Prince”.

TV 2 was also present when the Crown Prince met Gro Harlem Brundtland to hear his story of the war.

She herself has the experience of running away. A story that perhaps not everyone knows, but that has shaped it a lot.

– Neither my parents nor I have put much emphasis on it. A long time ago, he says, and emphasizes that it was quite common not to talk much about what happened during the war.

– When we got home, our mouths were shut. They would go ahead and not think about it, they wouldn’t talk about it, she says.

Brought to sweden

Gro Harlem Brundtland was born in 1939. Even his date of birth is marked by war. He shares it with Adolf Hitler, who turned 50 the day he was born.

– When my father came to the apartment, where there were several students living in a bus, and said he had a daughter, they told him that Hitler turned 50 and that Göring had just given a speech from Berlin, she says, continuing:

– Illustrates the type of environment we had at that time and how a figure like him dominated the image of the news.

A year later, war broke out. At that time, Brundtland’s mother became pregnant with her son Erik.

– My grandmother, who was Swedish, came to find me in Oslo, who was then one year old, because my parents were busy resisting the war that was being fought, she says.

In an orphanage

In Sweden, Gro Harlem Brundtland was often cared for by others, while her grandmother, who was a lawyer, worked.

Meanwhile, the parents were on their way to travel to England, but at the last minute it was decided that they would return to Oslo, where their father would work for the resistance movement.

Thus, Gro was reunited with his parents in the Norwegian capital. She speaks of calm and stable years before the Germans began arresting students around the summer of 1942.

– In the fall of 1942, when he pressed, my grandmother came back. He managed to obtain a diplomatic passport. Because it wasn’t just that people traveled to Oslo at the time, but that he managed to pick up his two grandchildren, he says.

Thus, four-year-old Gro, and this time also his little brother Erik, were brought back to Sweden in the summer of 1943.

– And then we got to an orphanage – because she worked. They put us in an orphanage on the outskirts of Stockholm, he says.

Escape on foot

The same autumn that the siblings were brought to Sweden for the first and second time, respectively, the parents also had to flee.

– Then the risk had become even greater, because then the Germans had started arresting student leaders, he says.

The parents took the train to Rena for a refugee route to Sweden. It was November and snowing, and Gro says parents had to leave at night when it was least dangerous.

After receiving help from a refugee pilot some distance down the road, the parents had to walk alone. They did so until they came to a small house, which they thought was on the Swedish side of the border.

There was a knock on the door, but upon entering the house, the father realized that something was wrong.

– As he enters, my father sees that the potted plants are set in metal, that is, in cans. Before they started to say anything, he realized that “we are in Norway. They don’t have cans like the planters in Sweden, “he says.

Therefore, he understood that there was danger on the road, because on the Norwegian side of the border, they were still not safe.

– So it was always dangerous. They could be Nazis. But luckily they came to this little red room, where there were some ordinary Norwegians who were surprised when someone knocked on the door at five or six in the morning of November, he says, continuing:

– And then they came to a registration station, and then they came and picked us up from the orphanage.

International environment

At that time, Gro’s family settled in Stockholm, where many refugee families from different countries lived.

In June 1945 they returned to Norway.

Gro Harlem Brundtland says her time in Sweden and the environment there shaped her a lot.

– It was an international environment. Everyone had run away from something and everyone was waiting for peace, new opportunities and a new life, he says.

She believes that the most important lesson to take us from the war years is how we humans depend on each other.

– It’s the community. Community involvement. The fact that we should not believe that we are individuals who have the best of themselves, and that in a way we are independent and free.

She believes this should also be seen in a broader context.

– Both in local communities, in the country you are part of and in the world, seeing you as part of a whole. Don’t think it’s just about me and the competition, and I’ll be the best and get the most wealth and income possible. We live in community.