The Moon Is Down Read Free

half century the supporting details remained scattered and anecdotal. No one knew how effective Steinbeck’s contribution had been.
    Over the last few years new evidence has emerged that documents the extraordinarily positive reception of The Moon Is Down in Nazi-occupied Western Europe, and confirms the novel’s success as propaganda. Throughout Norway, Denmark, Holland, and France, it was translated, printed on clandestine presses, and distributed, sometimes under the very nose of the Gestapo. The underground operations involved lawyers, book dealers, retired military personnel, housewives, businesspeople, students, and teachers who took great risks to disseminate The Moon Is Down because it spoke so directly to them and to their situation and so persuasively supported their cause. Their explanations of its effectiveness are remarkably similar: Somehow an author living thousands of miles away in a land of peace sensed precisely how they felt as victims of Nazi aggression. It never occurred to them that the novel was sympathetic to their enemy. In fact, they regarded it as far more effective than the prevailing formula propaganda, which struck them as comical because it was so absurdly exaggerated. And the Nazis certainly did not think the novel treated them favorably. They banned it wherever they were in control. A member of the resistance in Italy reported that mere possession of it meant an automatic death sentence.
    In spite of the Nazis’ efforts to suppress The Moon Is Down, hundreds of thousands of copies of the Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and French clandestine editions circulated during the occupation. It was easily the most popular work of propaganda in occupied Western Europe. The efforts put forth by the resistance and by ordinary citizens to distribute the novel within their respective countries, and the risks they took in doing so, bear witness to the importance they attached to it.
    The illegal Norwegian-language edition of The Moon Is Down was translated in Sweden by a forty-year-old exile named Nils Lie. Before the invasion of his homeland, Lie had been chief consultant for Gyldendal Publishers. Gyldendal had brought out translations of Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath in 1938, 1939, and 1940, respectively. Late in 1942, several thousand copies of Lie’s translation of The Moon Is Down were printed by a Swedish press on tissue-thin paper, bound with soft covers, and smuggled into Norway. Some were spirited across isolated points along the thousand-mile border between Sweden and Norway, and a few were dropped from airplanes, but the bulk were cached in luggage carried by regular rail lines. Most of the small, easily concealed pamphlet editions got past the control stations; apparently, a few did not, because officials in the Nazi puppet government in Norway were almost immediately aware of the existence of the special translation. They were so uneasy about its possible effects on the Norwegian people that, in December, when thirty-six copies were confiscated in courier luggage shipped to Oslo from Sweden, six were sent immediately to the head of the state police and to the president of the puppet government himself—the infamous Quisling. Thousands of unconfiscated copies were delivered by the Norwegian resistance to reliable citizens, who passed them along to friends. Frits von der Lippe, a wartime employee at Gyldendal in Oslo, related nearly forty years later how he became a typical “distributor” of the novel:
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    An astonishing thing happened [to me] in 1943. In the middle of the day in Oslo’s main thoroughfare, Karl Johan Street, among uniformed people and civilians who might be dangerous, a man came up on the side of me and said, whispering, “Follow me. I have something for you. Something you shall distribute.” I knew the face, but not the name. I said to him, “Why here, now?” He said, “I came this morning, and I