The Moon Is Down Read Free Page A

leave tonight, when I have delivered what I have in the suitcase.” “Back to Sweden?” I said. “Yes.” Then we went from Karl Johan over to Stortengade, the next street, and went into a house with an elevator with seven stops and traveled up and down, up and down, until we were alone. Then this man gave me four or five packages and said, “Go straight home.” And he put me out on the fifth stop and went down the elevator, and I’ve not seen him since. I went home and opened up one of the small packages and found the small copies of Natt uten måne [the Norwegian title of The Moon Is Down ].
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    Such was the popularity of The Moon Is Down in Norway during the occupation that in the middle of June of 1945, just five weeks after the liberation, a new legal edition was in bookstores. At that time in Norway an average printing for a novel was between one thousand and two thousand copies. The Moon Is Down came out in two printings of ten thousand copies each, both of which quickly sold out. The play version was performed immediately after the Oslo national theater reopened, only four months after the liberation. A Norwegian critic hailed The Moon Is Down as “the epic of the Norwegian underground.”
    A uniquely qualified witness to the novel’s effectiveness as propaganda in Norway was William Colby, later director of the Central Intelligence Agency under two presidents, Nixon and Ford. One of the few Americans on the scene during the occupation, Colby served during the early spring of 1945 in a special operations unit of ski paratroopers attached to the Office of Strategic Services. He had read The Moon Is Down three years earlier and was “tremendously impressed” by how well Steinbeck had captured the Norwegian national mood.
    In occupied Denmark, the first illegal Danish-language edition of The Moon Is Down was translated by two young law students, Jørgen Jacobsen and Paul Lang. They had received a copy of the American edition shortly before Christmas of 1942, along with a request for a Danish translation from a student resistance group known simply as the Danish Students. Its members hoped that distribution of the novel in Denmark would embolden the resistance movement there. Jacobsen and Lang completed their translation in one week. They worked day and night with a concise Oxford English Dictionary in one hand and a glass of beer in the other, glancing over their shoulders for the Gestapo. An anonymous comrade in the Danish Students delivered it to another member for printing. A short time after that, other printers with connections to the student resistance were assembling separate clandestine editions of Jacobsen and Lang’s translation. Perhaps the most productive of these printers was Mogens Staffeldt, a Copenhagen bookseller then in his late twenties who had been involved in resistance activities from the day the Germans invaded his country. Staffeldt hocked his life insurance policy to buy the mimeograph machine he used to crank out copies of The Moon Is Down in his bookstore. That bookstore, located on the town square, was on the bottom floor of the building which housed Gestapo headquarters for Copenhagen. But the steady traffic of Gestapo entering and leaving the building twenty-four hours a day failed to slow Staffeldt’s operations. At the time, the Nazis regarded Denmark as a “model protectorate” and were eager to mollify its citizenry. Staffeldt turned that attitude to his advantage. On several occasions when loyal Danish students came to his bookstore to pick up disguised bundles of The Moon Is Down and other forbidden titles for delivery to various distribution centers, Staffeldt stepped out of his store, summoned passing Gestapo officers, and enlisted their aid in loading the anti-Nazi literature. “Don’t just stand there,” he would scold; “help these kids!” The enemy’s secret police invariably