Word: nansen
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FROM DAY TO DAY (485 pp.)-Odd Nansen-Putnam...
...Norwegian sheriff and two Germans walked up to Odd Nansen's house and arrested him. Odd was the son of Fridtjof Nansen, the famed Arctic explorer,* a well-known architect and a friend of Norway's royal family (which was his crime...
...nearly 3½years thereafter, Nansen descended the scale of German prisons. From the county jail, he was taken to the Gestapo prison in Oslo, thence to Grini concentration camp near by, and finally to sinister Sachsenhausen in Germany, where he existed for a year and a half. It was May 1945 before he got back to his wife and their four children again...
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...