Daughter of World War Two RAF hero who fled SS in Norway creates exhibition in his honour

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

Nicknamed Olly, a Norwegian man left his family without telling them and fled the SS to help the RAF during the Second World War. Now his story is being told in Scotland for the first time

In 1943, Odd Grønfur Olsen, an RAF navigator who had secretly boarded a motorboat and headed to Shetland from Norway two years earlier, embarked on his third mission. Operation Gomorrah was a set of mass raids on Hamburg which damaged German military production but cost thousands of civilian lives.

Olsen should have died when the Halifax bomber he was on came under enemy fire, staying on board while several crew members parachuted to safety. But the bravery of his pilot – ordering his team to the back of the stricken aircraft while he attempted an emergency landing – saved him.

The artist Bodil Friele, Olsen’s daughter, has made a series of paintings inspired by her father’s life, some of which are now in Edinburgh’s Leith School of Art – set in the oldest Norwegian church outside Norway, established 150 years ago as a place where fisherman docked in the Scottish capital could worship. “As the plane descended they were hit again,” she says.

“The pilot, Erik Bjerke, ordered my father to get to the back of the plane while he did what he could, but there was no chance of a safe landing. Erik was killed but by a miracle my father survived.

“He spent five days on the run – hiding by day and moving by night – before being captured. He was then sent to a Prisoner of War camp. When he got back to Bergen the first thing he did was to visit the parents of the pilot and thank them for the way their son gave his own life to save him.”

While in the camp, Olsen wrote a series of poems. Friele only discovered them last year, and says they answered some of the questions her dad left behind when he died in the 1980s. “I think my father had hope,” she says, having used their words to create the paintings. “Hope that the war would end, that he would be free again, that he could go home to his family, his old life, and the people he loved and missed.”

She wishes she had known more about the feelings of a man who took part in a bombing campaign responsible for killing thousands of ordinary people. Olsen initially made his way to London determined to help liberate Europe with the RAF, which sent him to Canada for training in Little Norway, near Toronto.

“He escaped the SS, leaving his home in Bergen without even his family knowing where he was going, and then boarded a motorboat which took him to freedom in Shetland,” says Friele. “Stories about a few of our airmen are well known, but most are not.

“I wanted this exhibition to be an homage to the silent – a tribute to all the forgotten young men, to their courage and their sacrifice. Although the focus is on my father and his experiences as an airman and as a prisoner, it represents all those others whose stories have gone unrecognised.”

Friele says the family were shocked when he arrived home after the war, asking after a young woman called Karen who he had been “fascinated” by before his escape. They met, married and had Friele in 1946, with Olsen becoming a businessman who pushed for strong international relations and urged people to forgive but not forget.

His war experiences were harrowing: an accompanying exhibition will be held in Bad Liebenwerda, a German town near the Stalag IV B Luftlager 1 where Olsen was weakened by hunger and disease to such an extent that he was sent to Switzerland for rehabilitation after its liberation. “Sometimes in the night he would wake up screaming,” says Friele.

“I would ask him what it was and he said it was dreams about not having food, about barbed wire and desperation. Sometimes you would look at him and see his mind was in another place, somewhere far away.

“And every 27th of July, the anniversary of when he was shot down, he would sit on the cliffs and look out to sea. He would have a glass and drink perhaps a bit too much, remembering that day and the actions of the pilot who died.”

The first exhibition on Olsen’s life was held at a museum in Norway commemorating World War II and the experiences of Prisoners of War.

Verses from two of Olly’s poems

3 PoW Stalag 4b
Instead of the bombs
Hill 60s and Sommes
Let’s beat all our swords
Into ploughs

PoW Stalag 4b
To look forward and peer
Like some prophet or seer
Is never my aim or desire
I wish only my folks
My chair and my smokes
And maybe a bright blazing fire

• Prisoner of War: Paintings and Poems – an exhibition by Bodil Friele is at Leith School of Art until April 7 2016.

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Three places to discover stories of World War Two in

Churchill War Rooms, London
Discover the stories of those who worked underground as London was being bombed above them, and then find out more about the life and legacy of Winston Churchill in the interactive Churchill Museum.

Jersey War Tunnels, St Lawrence
At its centre is Höhlgangsanlage 8 (Ho8), the German Underground Hospital, built by forced labourers. Höhlgangsanlage 8 was built between 1941 and 1944 by using forced labour from countries throughout conquered Europe and was part of Adolf Hitler's plan to make the Channel Islands into an impregnable fortress.

IWM Duxford, Cambridgeshire
The 1940 Operations Room is a reconstruction of the place where RAF Duxford’s fighter aircraft were directed into combat during the Battle of Britain.

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/military-history/world-war-two/art550024-odd-gronfur-olsen-world-war-two