![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Climbing ashore, he heard gunfire, glanced backward and saw his friend on the ground, blood rushing from his head. Inside on her kitchen table is an array of food that she has spent the morning preparing for her visitors: hard-boiled eggs and dark goat's cheese, jam and bread and cured sausages. After taking shelter in a friendly arctic village, he managed to. During the German invasion of Norway in 1940, Baalsrud fought in Vestfold. The TIDLÖS team salutes the forgotten hero of the resistance, Jan Sigurd Baalsrud, who died on Decemat the age of 71.Baalsrud was visibly frail. Yet, with the passage of time, the German occupation and the extraordinary risks and acts of bravery taken by ordinary citizens like Jan during this time are becoming forgotten.Īlthough certainly the hero of a great survival story, Jan was far more than that as he represents all those heroes within the resistance movement, ordinary citizens whose resilience, bravery and self-lessness created the beneficent social democracy that Norway prides itself on being today. Numerous films and books have also been written to tell the story of his remarkable survival.įor decades, Jan’s escape made him a national folk hero, even though the man himself remained frustratingly opaque, almost unknowable. Every year a remembrance march takes place in his honour where participants follow his extraordinary escape route. Olav's medal with Oak Branch, a Norwegian military award. Jan was appointed an honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire and the St. ![]() After a long struggle to learn to walk properly again, Jan himself eventually returned to Norway as an agent, where he remained in active service until the war ended. Despite his amazing survival skills and resilience, he would surely have died without the help of numerous local Norwegians, who risked their lives in so doing.Īfter 7 months in a Swedish hospital, Jan was flown back to Britain, where he helped train other Norwegian resistance fighters. He spent the last several weeks tied to a stretcher, near death, as teams of Norwegian villagers dragged him up and down hills and snowy mountains to Finland and then with the assistance of the local Sami people, eventually to safety in Sweden. Alone for 2 more weeks in a cave, he used a knife to amputate 9 frostbitten toes to stop gangrene spreading. Thus began Jan’s survival story in which, with just one boot, having lost the other swimming, a soaked uniform hardening into a shell of ice, no map, no food, no water, and no plan, Jan ran, staggered, hobbled, skied and sled with frostbite and snow blindness for 9 weeks through Norway’s frozen fjords, the target of a nationwide manhunt.ĭuring this time, Jan’s feet froze solid, an avalanche buried him up to his neck, he wandered in a snowstorm for 3 days and he was entombed alive in snow for another 4 days and abandoned under open skies for 5 more. The two remaining soldiers withdrew, giving Jan the necessary time to run further up the snowy gully. Spotting a gully in the snowy hillside, Jan ran into it and took cover, shooting two of the four German soldiers who were pursuing him. Jan Baalsrud was the only one to climb ashore however, as his fellow countrymen were all either shot or apprehended. With the Germans in pursuit, the men lit a time-delayed fuse and then swam some 70m to the shore through ice-cold waters. Realising that their first mission was known to the Germans, the only option was to detonate the 8 tons of explosives they had brought with them. Their first mission was compromised however when Jan and his fellow soldiers, seeking a trusted resistance contact, accidentally contacted a civilian shopkeeper of the same name, who then betrayed them to the Germans. In March 1943, Jan and 11 other Norwegian commandos and crewmen left Scotland to establish a presence in the northern port city of Tromso, from where they could sabotage German military operations. The battle was soon lost however and after escaping to Sweden, where he was convicted of espionage and expelled, he travelled to Britain via the USSR, Africa, and USA, eventually arriving in 1941 where he then joined the “Norwegian Independent Company 1”, a unit created by the British for undertaking commando raids in Norway. In 1939 Jan Baalsrud graduated as an instrument-maker but in 1940, he went to Vestfold to fight against the German invasion. Jan Sigurd Baalsrud was born in Oslo on Decemand is best known for one of the wildest and most unfathomable survival stories from WWII, becoming a Norwegian folk hero in the process. ![]()
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