Roseslottet

Roseslottet sits just outside Oslo, on its North side between the city and the Gardermoen airport. It towers over the landscape with large installations and sculptures designed to impress, inspire and encourage reflection. Roseslottet is a temporary exhibition and its last season is 2025. With a spiralling pathway, the outdoor exhibition houses over 300 works of art, and the painting “Gunnvor” spoke to me more than any of the others. Her pink dress is set against the green grass she’s standing on, and the painting itself was framed by dark trees and snow in the Oslo winter, and her story is both sad and poignant. Gunnvor was a Norwegian girl who fell in love with a German soldier, and before the war ended they had a child together. Her boyfriend, the soldier, then got posted to another country and they lost touch. Gunnvor was left behind to raise the child on her own, but Norwegian post-war society was not kind to women who had had relationships with Germans – they called them “tysker- tøser” (“german dolls”) and were outcast by society and considered traitors.

My grandmother, Nora, was born in 1929 and was therefore a little girl when the Nazis invaded Norway. When I was young, she lived in the house next door, and while my parents were at work I would come home after school to spend the afternoon with her, and she would sometimes tell me stories from the war. One that always stood out was the time she went playing in the street like all young girls would were it not for the war. My grandmother had been told not to, because it was considered dangerous to be out when the German soldiers were patrolling, but she didn’t want to listen. Once, in winter, she lost her red hat on the road while being out and heading home, and a soldier called after her – not to scold her for being outdoors, or to scare her, but simply to give her the hat back. Like Gunnvor’s story, my grandmother’s memory was one of meeting a German soldier as fellow human being in a horrible situation – a reminder that we’re all individuals with unique stories sometimes caught up in events outside our control.