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Memoir more than 35 years in the making

Sigurd Askevold began writing his World War II memoir in the late 1970s
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Ingolf and Dee

The recent release of a book first submitted in a less concise form to publishers more than 35 years ago is a fascinating story of persistence and love.

Sigurd Askevold, who served in the German army through the entire span of World War II, knew his story was an important one. He was a resister and provocateur, a believer of peace and very clever, at a time and place when those characteristics could have cost him his life in a heartbeat.

More than three decades after the war, happily settled in Creston and teaching at Prince Charles Secondary School and running his Kootenay Candle Factory business, “Sig” began the process of putting his war and pre-war memories to paper. Ordered and methodical, though, he began by taking a writing course, and a typing course, too. He wrote short stories and essays to become more comfortable as a writer, and collected his notes and photos for reference. And so the project that would eventually become A Worm in the Apple,began.

Fluent in several languages, Askevold pecked away at his Remington manual typewriter, putting down his remarkable story in the language he reverted to when he wanted to be precise. Carbon copies were made. Eventually he completed a draft, written in German. It was, after all, a German story. Askevold was raised by parents who feared and despised war, and much of his father’s (Ingolf–Birger Askevold) life in the Great Depression was tempered by the rise of the National Socialist Party’s rise to power, with its leader, Adolf Hitler, pouring fuel on the fire of discontent and anger that rose like a Phoenix from World War I treaties. The German people paid a high price for that war, and the global economic depression filled them with a sense of hopelessness and resentment. With his nationalist message, Hitler was the right man at the right time at the right place to turn that anger into an inferno.

Ingolf–Birger fled to Norway, escaping arrest by hours, knowing that his anti-Nazi sentiments would cost him his freedom and, quite likely, his life. Sigurd, then a high school student, was left behind with his ailing mother and his siblings. He had learned much from his father’s teachings, though, and was uniquely prepared to survive and resist. Brilliant, clever, quick-witted and endlessly imaginative, the young Askevold joined the Hitler Youth and, eventually, the German army. He saw no other way to survive.

The memories of that experience haunted him, as they surely did his wife, Dr. Imme Askevold, whom he had met during the war. Sigurd talked to anyone who would listen, his children included, about his memories. Imme did not, keeping her own war-time recollections tightly locked away. Sigurd’s high school students occasionally saw the day’s lesson plan pushed aside so he could talk about the war, more out of a need to make the horrors of war understood by another generation than out of self-indulgence.

His completed manuscript was shared with German-speaking friends. His youngest child, Ingolf, recalls he and his sisters, Dee and Kirsten, reading it, too.

“We just kind of blew it off,” he said.

Eventually, Sigurd completed a translation, and an English version was born. It was filled with detail—all of which were meaningful to the writer—but Askevold failed to find a publisher.

But a response from one publishing house provided hope.

An employee from Pulp Press Book Publishers in Vancouver wrote a lengthy reply, including the following comment:

“There would be little point to giving you a detailed analysis of the book, since we won't be publishing it, but I would like to share with you a few of my own impressions and suggestions, for whatever use they may be. First of all, I feel that the essential story you have to tell is quite wonderful--"wonderful" because, for all its horrors, it demonstrates again and again how human guts and integrity, wit, imagination and ordinary decency can prevail against appalling odds--can anticipate and survive the worst wretchedness of history. Your experience was one which people of my (postwar) generation, in this country, have never gone through; the great strength of your narrative is that it makes that experience real and immediate in a way that neither fiction nor film can do. By the attention you pay to the countless small details of personal life in wartime, you give a human dimension to the larger sweep of the war. And that is an entirely admirable achievement.”

Askevold pared the manuscript, based on that advice, but he never did find a publisher. Each of his three children had copies, and another batch still sat on a bookshelf long after he passed away. It wasn’t until the family was emptying the house in preparation for its sale that Ingolf took on a project he hoped to see through completion—in his father’s memory and in hope that his aging mother would live to see it in print. That was in 2014.

Next week: How A Worm in the Apple got to Creston bookshelves.