Out of Darkness: A Perilous Journey

By Adam Andersen

The book tells the amazing story of a man who was sliding down a very steep slope into darkness and potential suicide and the seemingly innocent steps that lead to his ensnarement into the dark. It follows his experiences and his total transformation from a good guy into the twisted mess he became.

Then the story tells how he escaped from the darkness and is now whole again and living a wonderful, fulfilling life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inspiring Voices
• Release date: Aug 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781462412402

Adam Andersen

As a young boy he lived in a country that was occupied by Nazi Germany. He and his friends would harass the German soldiers whenever possible. His father and mother were involved in the underground and were eventually arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned. Because his father was Jewish,he was sent to a concentration camp. The author was ordered to report for deportation to a concentration camp because his father was Jewish. He escaped this by being hidden by families until the end of the war. After moving to America, he became involved with gangs. He eventually got away from that lifestyle, got married and moved out of Chicago. He then joined a suburban police force. During an encounter with people that were he encountered, he became embroiled in the occult, and his life became a nightmare. His escape was nothing less than miraculous.

Book preview

1

CHAPTER

It was a sunny Tuesday morning in September of 1937 that I was born. Of course, I don’t remember much of my early years. My earliest recollection is at about 3 years of age when Germany invaded Norway, (did I mention that I was born in Norway), I remember the sounds of the bombs exploding and the sound of the airplanes flying over. This was the beginning of the German Nazi invasion of Norway, and the beginning of a hard life.

People would come out and watch the airplane battles in the first few days of the invasion, but many were killed by shrapnel, so that ended quickly.

My next memories were from about a year later. My mom and dad were gone a lot and my grandmother would watch us. The only thing I remember about my grandmother’s house was an old car horn, the kind that had a rubber squeeze ball that would make the horn sound when you squeezed it. I imagine that I drove her to the edge of madness playing with that horn, but then again she didn’t have to bring it out when I came by.

The next few years my cousin Ken and I played outside in both summer and winter we had to make our own toys, which in itself was fun. In the summer we made boats from the bark of trees and the sails we made from newspaper or any kind of paper that was available. We played Vikings or Cowboys and Indians. Sometimes our play was interrupted by air raids, when we heard the air raid alerts we ran home as fast as we could. One time there was no warning and we didn’t know about the raid until we heard the bombs exploding. Since my house was closer than his we both ran to my house. When we reached the front door and opened it, the concussion from a bomb blast threw us through the door and across the room. That scared us a lot. There were many scary moments during those five years.

When the bombing was across the Oslofjord, we would go out on our second-floor balcony and watch. The searchlights were fun to watch and the tracers going up and of course, the bombs exploding. It was quite a fireworks display. But most of the time the bombs fell a lot closer.

We did not have an air raid shelter to hide in, so we hid in a closet under the stairs, which was the only room that did not have windows. Since two of the walls were outside walls we could sometimes hear shrapnel hitting the outside of our house. I’m glad there were no windows in the closet. It seemed like on every one of my birthdays there were air raids, I was beginning to think that they were planned just to spoil my birthdays. The air raids were first by the Nazis during the months of the invasion and later by British and Americans bombing Nazi installations or laying mines in the fjord below our house.

One day a German ship hit one of those mines, it was quite a show, I remember people cheering as the smoke was rising. But sometimes the Allied bombers were not so accurate with their bombs, I remember once they hit a streetcar full of local people and several times civilian buildings. Once I saw the lawn of the king’s palace with several huge craters where the bombs hit. The king, of course, was not there, he was in London where he had been whisked away to when it became apparent that the German army could not be stopped.

After the air raids, my friends and I would go out and pick up bomb fragments, which each of us would keep in his own box. I was lucky enough to have a very nice cigar box, some of the kids had to settle for a paper bag. I considered myself very lucky that my father had smoked cigars before the war (not available during the war) so I had a great collection of shrapnel. We used to trade them like kids in America would trade marbles or baseball cards. One time when I found a fairly large piece of shrapnel, a little larger than any of the ones previously found, that had a partial letter and number stamped in it, it was a very special find. Sometimes, not too often, we would find the empty machine gun shell casings that would fall out of the Nazi fighter planes as they fired their machine guns at Allied bombers that would regularly come to bomb Nazi installations. Or they may have fallen out of the bombers as they fired back.

During these air raids, we had to turn off any lights that could be seen by the bombers. A total blackout was the order from the Germans.

2

CHAPTER

I don’t remember why I did it, except maybe because the Germans said not to, but during one of the raids, I hung a bare light bulb out of my second-floor bedroom window. It didn’t take long before a banging on our front door was heard, followed by angry German voices, I guess a German patrol had been in the area. I think that maybe this had not been a good idea since it could have drawn attention to my parents, but I don’t think that the soldiers would be appraised of the Gestapo’s investigation of my parents. There had been many visits by the Gestapo, but at that time I was ignorant of the parts my parents had in the underground.

One night I was awakened by gunshots outside my bedroom window. When I looked outside all I could see was a Nazi soldier chasing somebody down the street. I found out in the morning that he had been shooting at a man and woman who had been out after the Nazi curfew hour. If you violated the curfew you took a chance of being arrested or shot. I think they got away.

Winter time was a fun time. We would build bottle runs down hills, fill bottles with water and leave them outside to freeze, this would make them heavier so they would go faster. Sometimes they would go so fast that they would not be able to make the turns on the track and would jump out of the track. I guess I could best describe the track to the Luge races that you might see in the winter Olympics.

With the snow drifts always being very deep, we would dig in hollowing it out like an igloo, sometimes with several rooms. We would make seats to sit on out of snow inside the igloo and even a window. We even made shelves for candles during the winter we would have a little light in the evening, the days were very short and the nights very long, we would have about six hours of daylight. In the summers we would have very long days, There would even be light enough to sit outside and read at eleven o’clock at night.

As we grew a little older we started trying to harass the Nazi soldiers. We would make snowballs, sprinkle them with water and leave them outside overnight to become ice-balls. We would load up our sleds with them and built up speed as we sledded down a hill we called Spiral Hill it had lots of twists and turns as it snaked steeply toward the fjord. Halfway down the hill, there was an old peoples home overlooking the sea, which was actually a fjord, Oslo fjord. The Nazis had kicked all the old people out and fortified it with small artillery and machine gun nests. They always had guards, soldiers walking at the gates, perfect targets. My mother spoke a little German, so we asked her how to insult them in German. So we learned how to yell you are a big devil in German so as we sped by them we yelled

Du ist ein grosse toyfel and pelted them with the ice-balls. One of my friends, I wasn’t there that time, claimed that one of the guards had fired his rifle after him. He must have been tired of being pelted with ice balls, whatever his reason he convinced us that maybe it was not a good idea to continue harassing the guards.

Later we figured out a better way to harass them. German patrols were always patrolling the streets in our neighborhood at night and one street had a short and very steep hill ending in a T intersection with a huge Oak tree at the bottom. We would go out and pour bucket after bucket of water until the hill was covered in ice. We tied a rope to a fence post on the other side of the street and let it lie on the street so the snow would cover it. We had an escape route all figured out which included hopping a fence, so all that remained was to wait for the patrol which was usually four soldiers. When they got to the rope we pulled the rope at our end which brought it up to a little higher than ankle height. They would trip and slide down the hill while we were making our escape. One time the last two soldiers of the patrol didn’t trip and they caught one of us who had trouble jumping the fence. They beat him up fairly badly, he was only 8 years old, so we decided not to do that anymore.

Since we did not have school, the Germans kicked out the kids, took over the building and made it an army hospital for their soldiers, we had plenty of time to think up our fiendish plans.

One night a German