Did you know the beloved author of ‘Pippi Longstocking’ also documented the horrors of World War II?

“Oh! War broke out today. Nobody could believe it.”

This is Astrid Lindgren’s first entry in the diary she is to maintain till the end of the war six years later. September 1, 1939 is a very ordinary day, and news of Hitler’s invasion of Poland reaches Lindgren and her friend in the afternoon, as they watch their children play.

Though Britain and France declared war on Germany soon after, no one, including Lindgren, then would have an idea that the war would stretch on for six years more (till 1945); that it would extend across several spheres in the world and bring terrible suffering and misery of a kind the world had rarely seen before.

That first entry continues in this vein:

“Yesterday afternoon, Elsa Gullander and I were in Vasa park with the children running and playing around us and we sat there giving Hitler a nice, cosy telling off and agreed that there definitely wasn’t going to be a war – and now today! The Germans bombarded several Polish cities early this morning and are forging their way into Poland from all directions. I have managed to restrain myself from any hoarding until now, but today I laid in a little cocoa, a little tea, a small amount of soap and a few other things.”

The diaries discovered

Seventy years on, when much of our knowledge of the World War II is largely via second-hand sources, print and visual, Astrid Lindgren’s diaries give us a unique perspective of that war. Published first in 2015 in Swedish as Krigsdacböcker (War Diaries), they were published in the English version a year later, in separate editions in the UK and US.

Born in 1907, Lindgren died in 2004, and these seventeen leather bound diaries were found in a wicker basket in her Stockholm apartment. It wasn’t a chance discovery, as her daughter, the translator and writer, Karin Nyman says, for as a child, she knew of these diaries (as did her half-brother Lars and father Sture). But what proved daunting were the cumbersome size of the diaries, complete not just with Lindgren’s notes, but also with newspaper cuttings. This published version comes with the omission of several newspaper pieces, though Lindgren’s notes remain intact in every way.

Lindgren was 32 when the war began, a stay-at-home mother and not yet a published writer. Her Pippi Longstocking stories would begin two years into the war, as bedtime narratives for Karin. Lindgren was not a journalist. Nor did she have a detailed knowledge of politics. Yet these diaries present a meticulous account of the progression of the war and are interspersed with her own worries about it, besides her daily routine.

Everyday concerns of war

Lindgren details the rising shortage of essential food items, the hoarding and storing, the saving for the war-affected children of Finland, and, later of Holland, Sweden’s neighbours, and then her own concern for her husband Sture who might be called away on war duties. All starkly evocative of the fact that war spares nobody, and leaves no one, not even the citizens of a neutral country as Sweden was during the war, unaffected; that political developments, especially of a brutal, violent nature, can have a huge impact on people at its periphery, and that war and conflict change us even in silent, unnoticed ways.

These diaries have a certain context. For one, Lindgren relies on, as mentioned, newspaper cuttings. There was no television, and radio stations depended entirely on news agency handouts. A year into the war, Lindgren also went to work in the post-office as a censor, steaming open letters addressed to and from people across Sweden’s borders, in case these contained vital information related to military secrets and Sweden’s state of preparedness.

The other matter relates to Sweden’s neutrality during the war, one its government stridently maintained throughout despite the frequent sinking of Swedish ships and submarines by German mines on the Baltic Sea, and the clear evidence that Sweden did allow German soldiers “transit” to and from Norway after the latter came under Nazi control in mid-1940. The official explanation, which Lindgren too mentions in her diary, was that such transit happened in times of “no war”.

The Scandinavian nations (especially Sweden and its eastern neighbour, Finland) also have a long history of antipathy towards Russia, for its invasions in the past. The memory of horrors inflicted, and misery perpetuated, prompts Lindgren time and again to laud and empathise with Finnish resistance against the invading Russian army (end November 1939). It also makes her categorically state at one point that if the very worst were to happen and Sweden saw war, it would be better to say Heil Hitler than to suffer the Russians once again.

Blaming the ‘other’

By the end of 1939, the speed of Germany’s advance had taken almost everyone by shock. It wasn’t just Poland, but also Luxembourg and Belgium to the west, and then Denmark and Norway. This was accompanied by Russia’s invasion of Finland. Both acts of aggression by Germany and Russia followed the claim that it was the “other side”, i.e., the victim, which had initiated hostilities first – a ubiquitous pretext that has justified war in every century.

In Sweden, as Lindgren observes, the impact of rationing was cumulative, and crept up on the ordinary citizen. Private cars were soon ordered off Stockholm’s roads to save fuel. As Lindgren writes during later years of the war, every few days she would check on her stocks, especially of butter, potato flour, sugar, coffee and cleaning soap. She considered herself fortunate and remained grateful that they could still have the occasional nice meal, as on Christmas and on her children’s birthdays, while the rest of Europe endured the agony of starvation. It was an attempt to present a façade of normalcy to her children, especially to her young daughter whom she assures every day that “war will never come to Sweden”.

In her diary, there is mention of Sweden’s aid efforts for its Finnish neighbours, and by the end of war, Sweden was to have around 50,000 refugees, not just from Finland and the Netherlands, but also Jews fleeing from growing Nazi persecution and atrocities – measures that, as the war advanced into its second year, the Nazis made no effort to hide.

The spread of war horrors

In 1940, as Lindgren’s diary shows, the world has turned darker. By June, Hitler’s armies were not merely in Norway (where a pro-Nazi government led by Vidkun Quisling would soon assume power) but also in France. Italy too had entered the war, and its invasion of North Africa was what prompted Britain’s direct and more aggressive entry, as it feared that an invasion of North Africa and of west Asia constituted an imminent threat to its colonies in Africa and Asia. Yet it was a beautiful summer. Lindgren writes, “…the pale green of leaves was fabulous and it smelt like summer”.

Lindgren had been witheringly critical of Britain’s vacillating in the early years of the war, when it had contented itself by dropping peace leaflets over Germany, claiming its enemy was not the Germans but only Hitler. America under Roosevelt also appeared to be dithering when it did not declare war following Italy’s entry (in mid 1940) on the side of the Axis powers. As Lindgren writes, the US was citing every legal treaty not to “stop on the brink of war’s abyss”. The US would indeed enter the war on December 7, 1941, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

From Lindgren’s diary, the moment when the war turned, almost suddenly, in favour of the Allies is blindingly clear: the end of 1942, when Italy went into retreat following the failure of its invasions in North Africa and Greece and as Germany made its ill-fated decision to march into Russia and lay siege to Stalingrad. That winter of 1942 was one of the severest in Lindgren’s memories, and the Germans, not prepared for a long siege, suffered and perished, in obedience to Hitler’s insistence on not surrendering.

It was in this period that the horrors of the Nazi extermination policy were most clearly apparent. Lindgren has evidence from the letters she was privy to; those written by the lucky few, among the Jews, who found refuge in Sweden. A letter to a fellow Jew in Finland mentioned how families had been separated, and how the writer had witnessed the death of someone familiar, after which he seemed unable to describe the horrors any further. This letter ended on a poignant note, and Lindgren quotes from her memory, “I will tell you the rest when I see you.”

Another letter alluded to the transportation of Jews from Vienna to Poland. The numbers sent from all over Europe to the concentration camps rose to nearly a thousand transported on a daily basis. As Hannah Arendt has written in her seminal book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Nazi bureaucracy oversaw this process of human extermination with ruthless and maniacal efficiency. The horrors of war didn’t spare the German citizens either, even though food items and other essentials were “commandeered” from conquered regions, Lindgren notes.

There was, amidst all wartime privations and regulations, when “food is everything”, some small cause for hilarity. In the Netherlands, rules ensured that no one could be out and about on the streets between 9 at night and 4 the next morning. This meant guests had to come with their blankets to sleep in and it all offered a “pretext for flirtation and laughing”.

Pippi Longstocking

Lindgren began the first of her Pippi stories in 1941, as bedtime stories for her daughter. In May 1944, the manuscript of Pippi Longstocking made up, in a smart grey folder, one of her daughter’s birthday presents. The book would be published some months later. A time when Lindgren still does not know when the war will end, for it seems “the war has been on forever”.

There was a likelihood it would end soon, for the Fascists were no longer in power in Italy and the Nazis had faced overwhelming defeats in Russia and in East Europe. The Normandy invasions were still some months away in early 1945. But writing these stories brought her happiness of some sort. Her contemporary, the Swedish speaking Finnish artist-novelist, Tove Jansson, too wrote the first of her famous Moomin books in 1945 – The Moomins and the Great Flood – almost as a reaction to the war.

Although there’s a certain stoic quality, a measured calm, often buoyed by a dark cheeriness in Lindgren’s narrative, there’s a pause, a gap, and it’s much later that we get to know of her own poor health toward the end of 1944. A sprained foot made her bedridden for a while. It was a time when her own writing made progress, but she grappled with insomnia and neurosis, writing that “things look bleak for her”.

Some reviews alluded to a crisis in her marriage; but it also might arguably appear as an instance of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – brought on, for Lindgren, from having read of and learnt of the war, its advances and atrocities, almost on a daily basis. Later that year (1944), she won second prize for another of her books, which would go on to be published as The Confidences of Britt.

Germany surrendered in May, 1945. By the end of the year, Lindgren went to the shop and bought for herself a copy of her first published Pippi Longstocking book. She would go on to write several more, many featuring the big-hearted, rebellious, and ever comical Pippi Longstocking.

These War Diaries, Astrid Lindgren’s last and posthumously published work, make for as essential reading as her other books do. Some of its contents might appear familiar to our jaded selves, and yet its brave eyewitness details of life lived on the borders of war remind us of the insidious, invisible horrors of war itself, how it creeps up at unguarded moments. As these diary notes also remind us: evil and bestial forces are always easily recognizable – yet that it remains so hard to answer such forces or even fight them, remains the strangest, least understood thing.

War Diaries 1939-1945, Astrid Lindgren, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death, Yale University Press.