Beginnings
In 1982, Eyvind Grundt from Moss, Norway, was sent to Poland on a mission for the Norwegian Red Cross. After completing his work, he began a search for the town where his father had spent two years as a Prisoner of War (POW) during World War II. It was a difficult task, since he only knew the German name of the town, Schildberg.
After many inquiries, Grundt found that Schildberg was a small Polish city of Ostrzeszów. In Ostrzeszów, by chance, he made contact with Lechoslaw Nowakowski, a language professor at the local college. Nowakowski had a good knowledge of the history of the town and shared Grundt's interest in the fate of the 1,150 Norwegian POWs once interned there at Stalag XXI-A.
They discovered that Grundt’s father had been interned in the building that now houses the town’s largest technical school. In the cellar of the school, several Norwegian artifacts were discovered, including a dented tin plate engraved “Kaptein Vagn Enger”. Grundt contacted the manager of the local museum, Josef Janas and they agreed to create a small Norwegian collection in the museum. Initially, it was in the right drawer of the manager’s desk.
Read more about this topic: Norwegian POW Museum
Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,—these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“The frantic search of five-year-olds for friends can thus be seen to forecast the beginnings of a basic shift in the parent-child relationship, a shift which will occur gradually over many long years, and in which a child needs not only the support of child allies engaged in the same struggle but also the understanding of his parents.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)