Oddvar Kise – from printing ink to the forest

Place: notodden · Exact position

Oddvar Kise (born 9 November 1922) grew up at Bakkegata 10 in Notodden. The family lived by the printed word: his father Halvor Kise ran a printing works and was the publisher of the newspaper Teledølen, and several of his siblings worked on the paper. The printing works and business premises, built in 1930, lay by Notodden Torv – which building it was has not been identified in the open sources, and the printing works therefore has no marker of its own on the map.

During the occupation Teledølen, with editor Karl Eide, became the foremost mouthpiece for opposition to the occupiers. The civil resistance was dangerous and costly: in 1941 the paper was fined and banned from publishing for a month, among other things for a critical article about the Germans' purchases of horses in Heddal. Later it had a politically appointed NS editor forced upon it, and in 1943 it was merged with Telen – in practice a closure.

Oddvar moved on from civil resistance to the work in the forest. He became one of Tysjå-gutta, who from the autumn of 1944 formed part of "Operation Sunshine". On the morning of 13 March 1945 he was on kitchen duty at the crofter's holding Øst-Gvammen when the Gestapo and Norwegian SS ski troops surrounded the place; he was dressed, grabbed his weapon and jumped out of the window. Two of his comrades were shot. Kise later became the last eyewitness from Øst-Gvammen and a central source for the local historians who wrote the story down. He died on 16 March 2022, the last of Tysjå-gutta.

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