NORWAY 1942 REDUX

JANUARY 12, 2026 – Yesterday evening I watched Betrayed, a Norwegian film about the flip side of the courageous Norwegian resistance during World War II, namely the round-up of Jews by Norwegian Quislings` doing the Nazis’ bidding. The film values alone—everything from casting to cinematography to screenplay writing to acting to directing—are topflight, a standard of excellence I’ve grown to associate with Norwegian productions. But the movie’s chilling story line is what I found most riveting, especially given the ubiquity of cruel and unusual tactics deployed by ICE agents in our fair towns, the “Twin Cities” of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and surrounding communities.

Betrayed is based on the true story of the Baude family, immigrant Jews (originally from Lithuania) fully ensconced in Oslo at the time of the German invasion in April 1940. The father owns a butcher shop; the mother is a seamstress. The three adult sons help with their father’s business, but one of the sons, Charles, becomes an accomplished competitive boxer. The movie opens with Charles’ home-ring victory over his Swedish opponent—to the thrill of the Norwegian crowd. The sons aren’t particularly religious and consider themselves Norwegians whose lineage happens to be Jewish. Charles winds up proposing to, then marrying the love of his life, Ragnhild, who isn’t Jewish but is welcomed warmly and spontaneously into the Baude family.

Over my lifetime, I’ve read many books and watched many films and documentaries about the Holocaust. I’ve been to Auschwitz—twice—and I attended the dedication of the memorial to victims of Stuffhof, a Nazi death camp outside Gdańsk, Poland. By no measure has the cumulative effect of this retrospective exposure left me desensitized to humanity’s inhumanity to humanity. I remain every bit as horrified today as I was when I first laid eyes on shocking photographs taken at the liberation of Auschwitz.

But this time around—while watching Betrayed—my perspective shifted from memories of the Holocaust, now 80 years in the rearview mirror, to the nasty grip of fascism here and now in my own community in the heart of . . . America. In the film we hear the police chief order his underling to “round up the Jews—men, women and children, wherever you find them, including the hospitals.” In the next scenes state policemen in black sedans leave their headquarters and fan out across Oslo to round up the “illegals.” As I watched I couldn’t avoid the parallel to the present: to the intimidating trucks and SUVs, marked and unmarked, driven by ICE agents as they pull up to residences, schools, hospitals, gas stations, restaurants, building sites, and places of business across the Twin Cities. As I saw the Nazi collaborators entering apartment buildings and rapping on the doors of terrified Jews, I saw immediately, a legion of ICE agents swarming down on people—human beings—going about their lives, not as hardened criminals, for crying out loud, but as ordinary people and in the overwhelming majority of cases, inextricably integrated into the life and commerce of a vibrant community; people who work their butts off, contribute mightily to the local economy, not only by their labor and enterprises, but by the taxes they pay. They are no different from the Baude family of Oslo, who in November, 1942 were shipped off to Auschwitz in November, 1942, where they perished.

My portrayal of the current ICE raids is not some hyperbolic, alarmist speculation. The likeness of the present terror to the horror depicted in Betrayed is inescapable. Secretary Noem’s glibly repeated line—that the Trump Administration is “simply” enforcing the law against “illegal aliens”[1]—“simply” doesn’t fly in the open air of the truth. The current action isn’t motivated by concern for “law enforcement”  any more than were Trump’s pardons of convicted fraudsters and drug dealers and people who actively participated in the violence of January; his disregard of the $50,000 bribe paid to White House Border Czar Tom Homan; Trump’s attempt to alter the outcome of the 2024 election by pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger in the famous recorded phone call wherein Trump said, “All we need is another 11,780 votes”; and . . . other countless contemptuous violations of the law.

Nor can any of us with a U.S. passport (or entitled to obtain one upon submission of an application, photos, and fee payment) and not a target of denaturalization efforts hide behind the notion that we’ll “avoid trouble by avoiding trouble.” That is, we can’t live beyond the reach of ICE terror by merely keeping our heads down, our noses clean, and our social media posts innocuous; by staying clear of protests and demonstrations. And strict compliance with orders and commands of ICE agents is a ripcord without a chute: all too many of their directives aren’t legally authorized, but once the cuffs are on and you’re hauled off to a detention center, good luck asserting your rights or even being allowed to make a phone call.

For most of us, I truly hope, avoiding trouble—arrest, detention, possible charges, fines, and imprisonment, even injury or death—has its limits. If your imagination requires any prompt in this regard, watch Betrayed or any similar film about the fate of European Jews in the 1930s and 40s. Picture, for example, yourself as the neighbor down the hall from a Jewish family in your apartment building. You hear vehicles pull up to the building entrance on the street below. You part the curtains and peer down just in time to see uniformed policemen exit their cars and stride toward the entrance. The next thing you hear is a knock on your door. It’s the mother of the Jewish family. She too heard the vehicles and saw the policemen. She asks if she and her kids—the dad has already been detained; his whereabouts unknown—can hide in your apartment.

There isn’t time to check the pamphlet someone gave you, prepared by a lawyer, telling you what you may and may not do when the authorities appear at your door requesting entry. In a matter of seconds, you have to decide the paramount question: “Is my name [(humane) Tom or Olivia] or is it (inhumane)‘Fascist Enabler’?” Then ask yourself what answer you want to live with—whether you survive the hour or live another 50 years.

Similarly, you are walking down the street from the bakery three blocks from your house or you’re riding the tram home from work. Along the way, you encounter policemen beating a couple wearing Star of David armbands. Neither they nor any other Jews have ever done you harm. The victims at hand aren’t troublemakers. They’re people like yourself, out about their business, their lives. You know full well that they’re being attacked not because they’re armed and dangerous or seditious “foreigners.” They’re targets simply because they’re Jewish and Jews have been outlawed. Your own survival instinct moves you to turn away, except . . . you notice the bloody lacerations on the man’s face after he’s been slammed to the pavement. As a human being with an ounce of empathy and a scintilla of decency, can you look away? Can you cross the street away from the beating, turn your gaze to the other side of the tram and call it none of your business? And if you hesitate and one of the goons—in disguise without identification—growls at you to “keep moving” as he shoves you nearly off balance, do you say with a smile, “Hey, I’m not mad at you!”? Will your humanity—however much in conflict with self-preservation—prevail?

If those two stark appeals to your humanity are insufficient, then try a third example threatening your personal safety. You’re filling up your gas tank at a local C-store. Several other patrons are doing the same at nearby pumps. Suddenly multiple ICE vehicles pull up to the station. A dozen agents jump out and surround the car next to yours, yelling and screaming at the man filling up and the occupant of his car. Desperate people—including the ill-trained ICE agents—do desperate things. This being the land of 300 million guns, one goes off. All hell breaks loose. You’re caught in the crossfire.

Ditto: the scene inside your favorite ethnic restaurant, now a target of ICE operations. Do you hide under the table with your mouth shut or do you stand up and shout your opposition to fascism—at the risk of being slammed to the floor, handcuffed, and hauled off to the local ICE detention center? If you’d prefer to dash out the back way, good luck: Multiple beefy ICE agents guard the points of ingress and egress.

Or you’re at the wrong place at the wrong time. You’re caught up in a dragnet. You assert your innocence and show your passport (I now carry mine with me at all times), but you’re detained anyway. Then, as is actually happening here in the Twin Cities, you’re offered a bribe and the promise of freedom if you’ll rat on (possibly) undocumented immigrants you know.

Again, none of this is wild speculation. We’re deep in real world, real time muck. So far, since last month, ICE has made 2,000 arrests in the Twin Cities. No one knows what’s happened to all the detainees. Over the weekend, DHS announced that it would be sending several hundred more agents to join the 2,500 ICE enforcers currently on the ground here. Door-to-door searches have begun in certain immigrant-centric neighborhoods. Likewise, vehicle-to-vehicle searches at ride-share EV charging stations at the airport.

Before ice appeared on our lakes his winter, I didn’t think we were living in Norway in 1942; turns out now we are.

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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson

[1] Taking a page straight out of the Dictator’s Handbook, Team Trump drives a tractor of demonization, and Republicans, well fed and oiled by the farmer, ride freely aboard the bandwagon towed behind.