Word: nansen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Norway's Nansen let his famed Fram "drift" (in winter it was locked in the ice) for three icy years, to test the vagaries of polar currents, emerged from the ordeal with two strong conclusions: "I have never before understood what a magnificent invention soap really is"; "Oh, how tired I am! ... Why should we always make so much of truth? Life is more than cold truth, and we live but once...
...international identification documents (successors to the Nansen passports of post World War I) would soon go to hundreds of thousands of refugees on the Continent. Refugees who had by necessity become connoisseurs noted with satisfaction that the new documents were carefully printed on heavy paper; they looked almost as impressive as the document which is generally considered the very symbol of the passport's glory: the royally embossed booklet in which His Britannic Majesty sternly commends his subjects to the world...
Below decks were 1,740 refugees, the human jetsam tossed up by two wars and their attendant revolutions and hatreds. Some were pro-Soviet Russians who had been imprisoned by the Germans; some were White Russians with Nansen passports; some were Bulgarians, Rumanians, Poles who turned to Russia when the rest of the world proved inhospitable. For 20 days before sailing most of the passengers had languished in a concentration camp built by the Germans for slave laborers. Then they had been driven to the dockside in crowded trucks, whisked aboard under the watchful eye of French and Russian police...
...last Nobel peace prize was given in 1938, to the Nansen International Office for Refugees in Geneva...
...himself famous by drifting from the North Pole almost to central Greenland on an ice pan) to be head of Glavsevmorput'. Then the Soviet press started whooping up the drift of the Sedov as a national adventure story. Its goals: to drift closer to the North Pole than Nansen's celebrated Fram (1893-96); if possible, to reach the Pole (where Ivan Papanin planted the Red Flag...