The Second World War had started in Europe and it seemed absolutely incredible to Signe, Arthur and the task force that it could happen once more. The team working with Buchman were dedicated to the idea that they must try to create a pattern for peace. They must try to show the workability of what stood on the billboards Arthur and Signe were making to express Buchmans strategy calling for a Hate free, Fear free, Greed free America. It was the best way they could conceive to bring home the reality to America and attempt to influence the events that escalated so horrifically in other parts of the world.
“The fun, the laughter and the flow of the Holy Spirit” were what they were attracted to when they met Frank Buchman and his team. They had experienced 2 world wars and were deeply committed to “remaking the world”. They wanted to mobilize America’s thinking so that people would realize that there was a battle of good and evil going on in the world and not just a battle for expansion of industry. America was in the middle of a big industrial boom after the economic setbacks caused by the food shortages of the dust bowl tragedy, lack of jobs and hunger. Materialism became very noticeable. And the idealism and practical steps the group presented appealed to people who finally saw something to hang onto, something that made sense once it had been gathered into a workable idea.
They had little or no contact with their families throughout the war – which is hard to conceive in an age when we can be in regular contact with loved ones via cellphones or the internet. The work they started that year kept them busy in the US for the 7 years of World War II and lasted eventually their whole lives.
From New York they travelled together across America in a cavalcade of cars. They made various stops along the way and notably the Worlds Fair in San Francisco (Golden Gate International Exposition). 1939
There they were part of an international parade which passed all the way down the middle of the high street, and took part in an exhibition at the Worlds Fair with all their national flags flying. It was dramatic. Arthur had made huge billboard that said something like Fear free, Hate free, Greed free world (For details read in Arthurs book A Preview For a New World.) That was what the group proposed that America should fight for. Arthur had created a big screen illustrated with portraits of people who had already started to change and implement the idea that change is possible if we are going to have peace in the world.
Signe remembers some of the funny sides of life on the road! “I have to laugh thinking back! I was sharing a room in lodgings, with a young girl from South Carolina and she was a terrible snorer! She snored absolutely relentlessly all night long! I have always been a very light sleeper and I was desperate! She knew that she snored and we used to discuss our problem as she slept easily and from the moment she put her head on the pillow she was off! In the end she came up with the idea that she would tie a stocking under her jaw and over the top of her head to keep her mouth shut (chuckle)! And that was a real test of my decision to do the heroic thing – to have to deal with this snoring at night!
“She was an artist too and we worked together for a long, long, time after that so this problem wasn’t a one-time event. It stayed with us! But we remained close friends throughout and it worked out. The great thing was that she could have been hurt and miffed at my criticism about her snoring but she cooperated and we solved it together!”
Buchman felt that the time had come to give his team training so that they could be equipped to operate on their own. Buchman invited some of the team to join him in Tahoe. He had a friend who ran a hotel there who had provided them with some beds and eventually they were around 100 people staying there untill winter began to make itself known.
Starting with a show at a party for a friend of Buchman’s in Tahoe they began to use the stage as an instrument to get across some of the ideas that they had tested in their private and working lives and found to work. A musical developed that demonstrated these personal experiences and with the help of gifted professional actors, actresses, writers and presenters within their team, the performance grew. Before they knew it, they were invited to bring the show to Reno, Nevada, one of Americas biggest casino cities! The mayor of Reno had seen one of the private performances that had been created and was thrilled with it. He saw the possibilities of reaching out which was a new idea to the task force who saw their work more in terms of person-to-person talks and definitely not from a stage! Signe had serious doubts that this was really the way to do it as standing on a stage was way out of her comfort zone. But that was what developed and from then on they were asked to one stage after another across America.
They were invited to perform to industries like Boeing, for Labor Unions and for soldiers in training at military camps. They were invited to perform in major cities where people had heard of their work and the effect it had had on people. The review was eventually called We Can Defend America and they soon had a full programme taking them from coast to coast. The production grew to became more and more professional as time went on. It came to bring a real sense of being able to do something positive that could affect the chain of events in the world to all those who took part.
At the beginning of all this strenuous coast-to-coast travelling, one of Signe’s friends called her early one morning to tell her that Norway had been invaded by a German military force. It was the 9th of April 1940. Signe couldn’t understand what they could want by invading Norway? These were very big happenings in the life of an ordinary young girl.
It took time before Signe could get any direct news from home. She didn’t know how they were or if they were safe. She discovered that she could send a telegram through the Red Cross, but it could only contain 25 words. No names or mention of the weather were allowed and several other things were forbidden to be mentioned. The family could also send a telegram back to Signe through the Red Cross but all the messages were highly censored with black lines drawn through the text so that they were often hard to understand. And this was how Signe discovered that her closest sister Nussa had had a severe nervous breakdown. Nussa were very close growing up, and from then on her family were closely in her thoughts.
Signe’s Father’s sister was married to Frits Holm one of the leading Air Force officers at the time. He had done many famous things one of which was to fly over the North Pole with Amundsen. She had heard that they had both escaped from Norway at the same time as the Norwegian King, several of the government and others and had set up an intelligence operations service with the British authorities.
One day when the team was in New York and Signe was in bed with a cold, her hostess loaned her a radio. Signe was fiddling with the radio and suddenly heard a Norwegian voice come over on the radio. He was speaking from the American outpost of the Norwegian underground in Washington.
Soon after she started listening, he started telling how a group of 30 young men had been caught by the German military. They had been preparing a fishing boat to cross the North Sea to get to England and join the free Norwegian forces there in order to liberate Norway together with the British army and navy. This group of 30 young men were going to join them and among them was Signe’s cousin Ole. It turned out that another of their group was an informer. When they had reached a certain point, he warned the German military about their whereabouts and they were taken captive. They were first interrogated to find out about the underground work in Norway but when they didn’t talk they were tortured and amongst other things they pulled out their fingernails. Finally they were shot and put in a mass grave. Including Signe’s cousin Ole.
Signe shared, “It was absolutely incredible that I should have been in bed at that point; that I had a radio to listen to; and that I had turned it on at that very moment so that I could hear the incredibly few words that were personally important to me so far from home. Very strange and I was devastated. But somehow this also confirmed for me that there is a higher plan. There is a purpose that I cannot understand or influence, but it is there.
“It is important to sensitize yourself to those hunches, those things that steer your inner path to this higher force. These hunches are always there but it is so easy to get too busy, and too thoughtless or absorbed in what you are doing so that you don’t take the time to be quiet and listen inwardly. Not that these kinds of experiences happen all the time, but in order to get in the habit of turning inwardly and being quiet. Arthur would say that what we need in the world is an explosion of silence. And silence is one thing that we don’t have much of.”
“That experience brought a feeling of certainty to me that there is a pattern and a plan and all I need to do is trust in it. Later I saw many times how it all fitted in to what seemed to me be an overall pattern that you could only sense when you looked back on it.”
After these painful snippets of news from home Signe didn’t spare herself,
“I felt that nothing was too much if we were going to make these ideas for peace work. In the end I got so overworked that I couldn’t carry on. A kind friend sent me off to a health spa run by Seventh Day Adventists. I had all sorts of treatments there. Water treatment, massage treatment and many others that I can’t remember. I was given very healthy food all of which helped me to clean out my body, but also my soul.
“I remember one day when I felt really desperate, I got some thoughts as if they had been written in clear letters or spoken. The words were: All you need to do is to give yourself fully to one person at a time. And this felt important for me – to know that I can’t alter things on my own but if we each individually do what is possible it will somehow be used and put together by a higher force.
“It seemed like a mosaic. You live your little piece here, and the next little piece there. You don’t see the whole pattern. You don’t know what it is going to become. But you see the bit that you have to do and so you go on building your part of the mosaic. And here and there you meet others who are also building part of the mosaic and so you go on building together. And maybe in our lifetime, or maybe later, the mosaic will be completed.”
Speaking from the stage to big public audiences was strange to Signe. Later in life she marvelled at all she had absorbed in those days, months and years about the artistry of how to speak your word. How to think and write to get a message across to people, not just big important words of truth, but in everything and in every way.
Signe experienced fundamental changes in her development, changing from a self-absorbed unhappy creature, to a person who dared to step out in faith and give of herself and that this would lead to something important in the big mosaic.
“This is what creates an atmosphere where people can receive thoughts of a higher nature. So although I spent a lot of time during these travelling days, doing practical things like layouts for handbooks, posters, books, leaflets and helping Arthur and his photo team, they were all artistic expressions of things I felt very deeply. It may sound trivial but they were fundamental to me.”
During the time in America Signe discovered a lot of new areas in her life that were new to her. For example in relationships with other people. She experienced a greater personal freedom from herself and more about what responsibility means.
“I felt how my life had changed, not because the external circumstances were different, but because I had a new constitution for my life, another positive attitude to life, the future and to other people. And that foundation has been built on throughout my life, it is new and never ending.
“This was a real, deep, experience of being in touch with a purpose higher than myself, together with others. It was a tremendous experience. We did many things wrong. Some experiments didn’t work. We did many things that we might have done better later but I think that to all or most of us, it was deeply inspiring.”
The team in San Francisco had booked the big opera house in 1945 so that the show “You can defend America” could be presented on stage. Then they discovered that the League of Nations (before it became the United Nations) had decided that San Francisco would be their meeting place for the first gathering of the nations in order to create the constitution of the United Nations. This happened during the days the MRA team was in San Francisco.
Arthur had applied to the Norwegian and British embassies in Washington to be their press photographer at this whole session. As it turned out Arthur was the only representative for the British Press and Signe the only representative for the Norwegian Press.
There were altogether 80 photographers there and Signe was one of 3 women. One woman dressed and acted like a man – and disappeared easily amongst the crowd of mail photographers – which was of itself quite unusual in those days. The other was a young woman who arrived every day on a motorbike much like a Valkyria, wearing a white sweater, black trousers and yellow flying hair. And then there was Signe – in her best Sunday dress (chuckle!). Signe found this very amusing!
There were several attempts made to patronize her, particularly as she was the only woman photographer who looked like a girl! On the first day, she went into the big foyer where all the press and photographers gathered and she became very aware of a group of photographers across the hall who were obviously looking and talking about her. She watched them out of the corner of her eye as her heart beat like drumsticks. Eventually one of them came over to Signe and said, “We haven’t seen you before.” Implying that all the photographers knew each other. “No, she said, you haven’t seen me before.” He asked who she represented and when she replied, “The Royal Norwegian Information Service.” He responded “Oh, it’s very royal isn’t it!” And Signe said, “Yes, it is!” She could see him register that she was no push-over and from then on, she was fully respected as a photographer.
Most of the photographers were big men in comparison and Signe had to struggle to claim her shot when it came to popular speakers. For instance, when the Russian delegation spoke and there was a barrier of photographers in front of her she ended up going up onto the balcony while Arthur was able to be down on the floor and could creep up to the stage if he wanted. But then Signe didn’t represent a big country like Britain either. Gradually the other photographers began to make space for Signe to get her shots and showed her the ropes, like where to go if her camera gave her trouble, as you had to tinker with our camera yourself in those days! They all had big enormous press cameras in those days. Complicated things. Signe had a slightly smaller version because she couldn’t lift the heavy version that Arthur had with flash bulbs.
Arthur, had a great gift of making friends with all kinds of people, he didn’t care if it was the King of Saudi Arabia or a taxi-driver. He talked to them about what their team was doing and invited them to the performance that was to be held in San Francisco where they also could meet Frank Buchman and other interesting people. They came of course, were very impressed and became life-long friends. The people around Frank who were experienced and knew the world, were able to meet them on their own terms and that impressed them too, for instance Prime Minister Jan Smuts from South Africa who was there.
Arthur took a portrait of the son of the Saudi Arabian King during the League of Nations meeting. He was invited up to take the portrait in his room at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and Signe was asked by Arthur to come as his assistant. Arthur had to have a tripod for his camera and Signe tried to make conversation while Arthur was setting up. She pointed to something that was pinned onto the wall behind the Prince and asked naively, “That is very interesting, does it have a special meaning?” He replied haughtily, “It’s our national flag!” Signe felt like sinking into the floor! She, a simple girl from a small country and northern Europe felt so naïve. She had hardly met a person of colour before and she didn’t follow world events. She was still a child at heart. Arthur quickly smoothed it over and took a beautiful picture.
In those days news was spread through newspapers and by radio. People sent telegrams or telexes if they wanted to reach someone urgently but there was no instant messaging or social media. Since the task force’s focus was to spread good news that could inspire change, Arthur and Signe started to train a team of young people in the art of recording all that they were doing. Together with those who were gifted with words they got the inspiring news onto billboards and into the media. Others wrote music and created musical reviews and stage plays which they produced and travelled with across the US in a cavalcade of cars. They stayed with friends and enlisted new teammates everywhere they went.
The time in New York with SCHUMACHERS
AA
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