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FRESH FISH

EXPORTS STILL FLOWING FROM NORWAY IN CONDITIONS SET BY NAZIS. HOPE OF BETTER DAYS TO COME. (By Sydney A. Clark in the “Christian Science Monitor.”) For something like half a century frost-white refrigerator railway cars have rolled from Norway to Germany by way of Sweden, Denmark, and a couple of big ferries, and these cars have borne the bold legend, readable at two hundred yards, “Frische Fische aus Norwegen” (“Fresh Fish from Norway”). I can testify to seeing them by the score in 1912 as a youngster. I saw them again between the World Wars. I saw them in the summer of 1939, and wondered darkly how long they would roll. I even posed this question to a leading citizen of Bergen in June of that year, and he laughed in genuine amusement.

“You Americans!” he exclaimed, good-humouredly. “You see a war behind every tree and in every headline of your own excitable journalists. There will be no war. But even if there is, Norway will stay neutral and Germany will buy our fish.” His score as a prophet proved to be exactly zero. There is a war. Norway is not neutral. Germany does not buy the fish. She steals them. Or perhaps she pays ' with shoddy “occupation marks,” which are no payment at all, but a fraudulent trap to force the conquered peoples deeper into bondage.

Norway’s fisheries are a major source of national income when payment is made in real money. Cod and herring account for the larger part of this income, and the oil from the liver of the cod is a very important by-product. Below these two ichthyic leaders comes the mackerel, a poor but far from negligible third. Lobsters also are numerous, and in the rushing streams and ice-cold lakes of Norway salmon and trout are so abundant that (in peace-time) British anglers tumble over each other to pay fancy fees for fishing rights. The Germans, of course, have stolen the best of these' fresh-water rights, and one feels absolutely certain, though unable to prove it, that many a lachs (salmon) and forelle (trout) finds its way, by German stealth, from Norway to the sumptuous tables of Nazi bigwigs. The waters along the entire coast of Norway are alive with fish, but the most fabulous sectors of all are those off Finmark in the extreme north (Hammerfest and the North Cape); off the Lofoten Islands, whose mainland port is Narvik; and off the Romsdal, whose chief port is Andalsnes, the lovely but tragic town which was Britain’s “first Dunkirk” in the spring of 1940! In the good old days of Norway’s freedom 100,000 persons were employed in her fisheries, and the total annual value of the products was nearly a hundred

million kroner, which is to say twentyfive million dollars.

Bergen is the great “middleman” of the Norwegian fish industry, as Boston is the middleman of American North Atlantic fisheries. It makes one wonder if fish and culture have achieved seme mystic affinity. As the symbol of the cod dominates Boston’s Hill of Culture, so the business of selling and distributing the cod dominates Norway’s west coast city of the arts —but perhaps Americans are not properly aware of Bergen’s cultural significance, which is of the very first rank. The illustrious natives and the ever-burning ambitions of this one city raised a pov-erty-stricken northern land with a total population about that of Philadelphia to a position of world importance in music and letters. Here Ole Bull, Edvard Grieg and Ludvig Holberg were born. Here was founded —by Ole Bull —the National Theatre Movement, which raised Norwegian drama from imitative nothingness to a strong original force noticed and felt everywhere. Both Ibsen and Bjornson took a hand in developing this movement, without which the genius of Holberg might never have been uncovered. From a pedestal in the vastly busy and not-too-savoury Fisketorv (fish market), Holberg in bronze still surveys his native city—unless for some reason of their own the Nazis have now “purged” him. Education, music, literature, painting — and fish. These are strands that have woven Bergen’s greatness. The white cars still, and more than ever, roll southward to bring nourishment to Norway’s implacable oppressor... Less and less is Norway’s product allowed to nourish Norwegians themselves. Starvation threatens, Bergen seethes with unrest. Trondheim boils over. Hostages are shot in cruel futility. But there is a persistent and increasing aroma in the air, the fragrance of freedom-that-will-come. Before too long the Nightmare of the North will be ended. There will be Frische Fische IN Nofwegen.

Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WAITA19430211.2.41

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 February 1943, Page 4

Word count
Tapeke kupu
760

FRESH FISH Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 February 1943, Page 4

FRESH FISH Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 February 1943, Page 4

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