Peter Moen's diary

Subject: Peter Moen is dead. He was drowned on September 8, 1944, when the German prison ship Westphalen struck a mine off the coast of Sweden. While he lived he was not a great man - not even a very good man - but, without knowing it, he left behind him one of the greatest human documents of all times. To describe the material in Peter Moen's Diary is impossible, but the history of how the diary came to be is fascinating. This is the story: Peter Moen was an ordinary Norwegian businessman, an actuary for a large insurance company. He was fortyish, married, childless. During the German occupation he got into the Norwegian underground movement - not for any particular reason of patriotism - and soon became the editor of London Nytt, a clandestine paper. He was arrested by the Germans in February, 1944, brutally interrogated and thrown into solitary confinement. Alone in a dark cell, he began his unique journal. Having no pencil, no pen, Moen "borrowed" a pin from his black-out curtain and pricked every word of his book on coarse, grey toilet paper! Guards often caught him and confiscated his work. Diligently, Moen repeated his labors and continued the book - not with publication in mind, for the diary was a secret; the deepest secret a man can have. As the chapters were completed, Moen rolled them systematically and crammed them down a ventilator into what he thought was oblivion. His only reward was to have got the true picture of himself down in words - in some tangible form. The following September, Moen was carried off on the ill-fated prison ship. His precious journal safely behind him, he told one or two of his fellow prisoners what he had done. The ship was sunk, and of the five survivors, one knew of Peter Moen's diary. After the liberation of Norway, the pages of the secret book were found safe under the floor of Moen's cell. And here it is today, as it was written - one of the strangest books man has ever known - a book of almost unbearable power. Is it a memoir? No. Is it an account of torture and hardship? No. What can you call it? - Confession? Philosophy? Religion? Credo? It is none of those things and yet it is all of them. It is a devastating self-analysis of one man - and all men - written with the honesty that only fear, loneliness and impending death can produce. -- from dust jacket 146 pages illustrations 21 cm