This Land is no Stranger Sarah Hollister (best biographies to read .txt) 📖

The Vosses, though, they were weaned on the housepainter’s poison. Loke Voss fell in with Baron Kron and the concept of the master race. He cast his lot with the Brownshirt bullyboys, becoming one of their leaders.

As Brand read on, the picture of the past slowly came into focus. Two friends, brothers almost, buffeted in the tides of history and turned against each other. It was the old story of Cain and Abel. “Loke Voss,” a name she heard as a child hissed out as a curse, became less a bogeyman and more of a real flesh-and-blood figure. Still alive, Hammar had told her, and still haunting Brand’s life. Another faintly remembered name from the past appeared, not a person but a newspaper. Nordic Light.

Here was the core group who founded Nordic Light newspaper: Gustav, of course, our older brother Anders, his wife Stella, our old friend Per, a man named Karl Gustavsson, Klara, and her sister Alice.

Oh, those were heady times. We were intent on saving the world. The newspaper offices served as our communal home. I still remember the ugly old building, three stories high with a roof that leaked. I always went to sleep to the clatter of the big printing press rolling out copies of the truth. Asleep or awake I would often have one of the children with me, not my own (not yet) but those of Anders, Per or Karl, it didn’t matter, all kids in that community were everybody’s.

One I loved more than others, sweet little Hanna. She was our niece, the youngest of Anders and Stella. I spoiled her most awfully, always taking her hand in mine, playing silly games. She is what we call lillgammal, a kind of spirit inside of someone young, who is older, wiser, beyond her years. Even as a baby Hanna had to wear eyeglasses, and she would stare up at me, so serious and solemn that I had to forgive myself for finding it comical.

I felt that in her child’s heart there was the future, that she would live to see a better world. I had this idea we were shielding the little ones from all that was horrible in the outside world, injustice, ignorance, and cruelty. We had our little enclave at the Nordic Light offices, a refuge, a sanctuary where I could protect Hanna and the other children from harm.

I was wrong.

Brand foresaw the tragedy that was coming. She wanted to stop reading but couldn’t help herself. Maybe after all this story was why she had come to Sweden. To perform an exorcism on the past.

She didn’t want to believe it. What possible impact could events that happened long before she was born have on her reality now? It seemed an unlikely notion. But something had twisted Brand’s life. She had struggled and thrashed, trying to understand what it was. Elin’s letter served to point the way.

On 3 March, 1940, began one of the most terrible nights of my life, when the terrorists came to attack our offices.

How the Nordic Light building was laid out had the kitchen and living quarters on the third floor, and what we called the Red Room meeting hall on the second floor, the printing press, telegraph, and distribution and paper supply rooms on the first. Corridors and stairwells ran up the whole center of the building.

The attackers knew right where to go. They knew our paper supply would burn easily, setting the whole building on fire. They were using newsprint, our own weapon, against us.

Gustav, Alice and Klara were in the distribution office on the first floor. Karl and Per were on the second floor, the babies were already asleep on the third, with Stella watching over them. When the arson hit in the paper supply room on the opposite side of the building from us, the central stairwell acted as a chimney. We all rushed out of the distribution offices to find this huge yellow beast of a fire already stalking up the stairs.

Gustav dashed forward but an explosion blew him straight off his feet, and he came flying back into my arms. Solid smoke, so thick that it was like hot black cotton, burst at us. We crawled close to the floor, trying for escape.

I could hear them. I hear them still. I have heard them every day of my life from that moment on. Hanna crying, screaming, oh, oh, oh, mamma, mamma! Auntie! Auntie! Gustav, Alice, Klara and I threw ourselves toward the stairs, but again we were thrown back, our clothes and hair smoking and half on fire.

Now no voices came from the third floor. Only the roar of the beast. It was so hot that our tears sizzled and instantly turned to steam as they streamed down our faces. We staggered outside and collapsed on the street in front of the building, staring back in horror at our beloved home that had turned into a death trap.

Karl did not make it out. Per, neither. Stella died huddled together with Hanna, and Karl’s child Peter.

Just by fate, we had the twins with us that night. Sanna and Folke were colicky newborns and had to be kept separate to keep from waking everyone in the shared upstairs. I remember holding them, watching the burning building collapse, two squalling babies, their parents dead, all of us survivors made orphans of the fire. I raised them myself so the memory of evil was kept fresh in their souls.

Brand remained lost in a tangle of black thoughts. Lives destroyed. Brutality, fire and death had burned through three generations. She had received hints of the truth before, but now it appeared confirmed. A ghost had sunk its teeth into her family, a still-living ghost named Loke Voss.

The pain the man inflicted had even crossed oceans, dooming Gustav to a life half-lived, then brutalized her mother. In adulthood, alcohol served as Marta’s painkiller. Her marriage to Brand’s father broke apart. The woman’s life