Skogstad Iver & Marta

Kari Pattersen Musaeus Iver & Martha Skogstad On 26 and 27 October 1942 the police arrested male Jews in Oslo. Women and children were only rounded up in the next wave of arrests, but not knowing the German plans, panic spread among the Jews. When Solveig Levin reached her home, a neighbor told her that the police had come by. Not daring to go into her home, Levin stayed outside on the street, her panic mounting. Her baby daughter, Mona, was at the baby sitter, and she asked the sitter to bring the child to a certain meeting point. In her testimony Levin described her enormous fright - imagining the worst when the baby sitter was running a bit late. "I was in a total panic, completely hysterical, sweat pouring off me – and dared ask no one if they had seen her or my daughter" - she wrote in her testimony. A neighbor let her into her apartment, but said she would have to leave when her husband was about to return from work. Solveig found herself out in the street again. "I was standing on the sidewalk with my child, it was completely dark, 18 degrees below Celsius, and I had no idea what to do or where to go to." Desperately she decided to knock on the door of a friend from her school days, Kari Patterson. Patterson took the frightened woman and her baby in, exclaiming "thank you for coming to me!" and called an acquaintance of hers who was in the underground. Levin and her baby were taken by the underground to the Oslo railway station, and by train to the farm of Iver and Martha Skogstad, where they found other Jews who were going to cross the border to Sweden. After a short stay at the farm they set out towards the Swedish border, climbing up a steep slope through the forest. When Mona began crying, the others became nervous, afraid her crying would alert the Germans. Mona was given a drop of sleeping potion, and Iver Skogstad carried her for the rest of the way. Once they crossed the border, they realized an old couple was missing. Skogstad went back tofind them. In Sweden they were taken to a refugee camp. There Solveig found her husband, who had escaped separately. The Levin family stayed in Sweden until the end of the war, and then returned to Oslo. On 11 August 2009 Kari Pattersen Musaeus and Iver & Martha Skogstad were recognized as Righteous Among the Nations.