Yes, I’m back from Oslo, where I spent the weekend running a training course for local Baha’i representatives in the mystic arts of external affairs in the beautiful Baha’i Centre.

We covered a range of subjects, from how to arrange and conduct a meeting with your MP to dealing with the media.

I stayed here with Britt and Lasse Thoresen:

Amongst other things, I went to see the excellent Centre for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities, which is housed in this castle, formerly the home of the notorious Vidkun Quisling, fascist Minister President of German-occupied Norway during the Second World War. The castle (actually called Villa Grande) has been beautifully refurbished inside and out, and the exhibition about the Holocaust is designed in such a way that it touches the heart as well as the head.

I found myself in helpless tears in the basement room whose walls were covered with the names of the Jews deported from Norway by the Nazis. There are many, many names on the walls of that room, but one hit me with great force: it was the name of one of my Jewish friends in London. For a second I thought, No, how can that be? And then I understood. All these were the names of people’s mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, cousins, aunties, friends. All these were the names of persons, members of the human race, who had been carted off to some of the most inhumane places on the planet and cruelly killed or allowed to die.

Relief from the oppression of that place came from the view from a small balcony high up the tower of Villa Grande, the view in the evening twilight over Oslofjord and the departing Copehagen ferry.

No doubt Quisling and his wife enjoyed this view, while the Jews of Norway were deported to their deaths in cattle trucks.

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