When a person wants to tell something important, society has a duty to listen and meet it with sincere curiosity. This is especially true if the story to be told is unknown, unpleasant, or unclear to the person telling it.

Without it being explicitly formulated, such a perception (such a moral standpoint, if you will) was an important starting point when the National Medical Museum in 2008 worked on the film and exhibition Bad Memories from Grefsen Children's Sanatorium 1951-54 and what eventually became a larger documentation project, which we called "Sanatoriebarn". We got in touch with Arild Sømo and Einar Måseide and went with them back to Grefsen Children's Sanatorium in Oslo, where they had been admitted as children in the 1950s. Neither of them had previously visited Grefsen again. They had avoided it. Sømo drove a trailer in Oslo for several years, but never drove Grefsenveien. Måseide once plucked up the courage to go back, after thinking about it for a long time, but was left standing outside the fence. He was unable to go inside. We at the museum were completely unprepared for the painful memories and strong emotions that awaited us – that is, those, there, when they walked around the sanatorium building in 2008.

They told about coercion and punishment, about the experience of being alone and abandoned. Later we also talked to other children from the sanatorium and heard about care and warmth, and about nurses and fellow human beings who did good to people and made them well. There were different stories we had never heard before, despite the fact that we worked two kilometers away from the old children's sanatorium - and with the history of medicine. We were surprised and touched. And then we were happy to be Sømo and Måseide's, and eventually many others', channel to the public. We were concerned with the individual's right to remember - and to tell. And we wanted to be a microphone stand. We wanted to bring the stories from the tuberculosis sanatoriums forward without taking anything away or adding anything.

Society has a duty to listen to stories like those told by Sømo and Måseide. We as a museum have a duty to listen and to pass on the stories. We believe that such communication will help make society, the community, the sum of us all, more responsive, sensitive, more receptive to nuances and small differences, to each and every voice. That is a very clear goal. The museum wants to continue to pass on the stories of individuals, as precisely as possible as the individual experienced them.

That is: How they experience that they experienced it. How it affects them now. Because neither those who were present themselves nor anyone else can really know – precisely, in detail and exhaustively – what they experienced. “Dear mother and father, I want to go home,” wrote Bjørn Oscar Hoftvedt, aged six, in a letter from Grefsen in 1955. “Dear mother and father, I am fine. I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to,” he wrote in another. The two letters were written at about the same time. We don’t know more than that about them and the circumstances surrounding them. Once he wrote that he wanted to go home, another time he wrote that he didn’t want to. We don’t know why he wrote what he wrote. We don’t know what he wanted most, or most often.

The National Medical Museum has been working with sanatorium children for about 3 and a half years. During this time, and conversations and contact with around 50 people, we have become increasingly concerned with how they relate to what happened then. How it is handled – now, in the past, by those who experienced it alone and by all of us together, and how the individual and the community's handling affects each other. And why it is handled the way it is.

We are also concerned with what “really happened”. But we know that there are several versions of the story of the children’s sanatoriums. What patients, caregivers and relatives experienced at the children’s sanatoriums is not uniform, but it is there. It exists. As a memory, as a beginning, or a “spot”, as author Inghill Johansen writes about in the exhibition prologue; which cannot simply be “cut out, lifted out. Because it has become something else.”

What has become of it? How has it become like this? For many, it has become difficult. It has become lonely, unapproachable. Many have spoken little or nothing to their loved ones about their stay in the tuberculosis institution. The title we have chosen is indicative in this respect: “I didn’t tell anyone that I had been sick”. The reasons for not telling vary and are not always easy to come by. Some describe shame and fear of stigmatization. Others have simply not had the words or any space to talk in. Some have actively tried to erase it – burning diaries, photographs, anything that could remind them of that time. Others have simply thought little about it. “I have thought that I must try to forget it,” says Jorunn Sumstad, who had three sons in the sanatorium, aged 3, 5 and 7. “But I never forget it. A mother never forgets something like that.” For many, it has become big and lasting. "It has followed me my whole life," says Astrid Torunn Pedersen, who was in a cast for a year and a half with tuberculosis in her back.

This project has thus become largely about remembrance. About remembering – about the importance of memory and memories. And forgetting. “It weighs on me that one remembers so little,” writes Marit Holte, who was four years old when she was at Reknes sanatorium in Molde. She would have liked to have remembered more. For many, the unsolved and uncertain are some of the most difficult things. Why were our Christmas presents taken away from us? Could it be that we saw them again in the attic long afterwards? Why were we hospitalized for so long when there were medications and superior research being conducted on us? Other questions deal with more complex matters: Why was it so impossible to talk about our stay at home?

The project is therefore about memory, and also about memory strategies. How to deal with what you remember and what you don't remember? How, and to what extent, is it appropriate to remember or not remember something? Many describe it as a relief when they finally started to remember and talk about their sanatorium stay. "Now it's become my hobby," says Stein Nordby, who until 1998 was silent about his 10 years at the Coast Hospital in Tromsø in the 1950s. Many of those we have come into contact with now speak quite easily and willingly. They tell, remember and attach importance to their memories. At the same time, many of them have siblings, or close friends, who don't. "My brother just kept it all a secret," is a typical statement. And typically followed by: "And that has made the relationship between us difficult."

We live in a time, an environment and a generation where remembering and talking about it has a high status. “I’m glad we got to talk about it” is a common saying. A much more controversial and startling statement is: “I’m not glad we got to talk about it.” As an extension of this, the museum and the body of thought we represent are in danger of helping to produce new shame: The shame of not speaking, of not being able, or wanting or being able to remember and tell.

Arild Sømo is not sure if he is happy that he has started talking about his sanatorium stay. “It attacks me in a different way,” he says. He is changed, challenged by stories from the past that have suddenly become more significant. He does not believe that it is an undivided good. And he is the one who knows it best.

We have encouraged him and others to tell their stories. We realize that we are asking for something big. We – the museum – have a big responsibility, and we run a very small risk – compared to all those who put absolutely crucial things into the pot: understandings of their lives, perceptions of themselves, connections and meanings in their past.

Yes, we have a duty to listen when someone wants to tell a story. We do not have a duty to tell, but we do have a duty to facilitate the possibility for several stories to stand side by side, in their diversity and in their significance. We all help to influence what are common stories and memories in a society, what and how it is possible to remember. As a society, a museum and as individuals, we all have a responsibility to foster care. Care and interest in the individual's history - as it reads at any given time. Care for the significance that history is given at any given time.

This project is based on things that happened in the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, it is a contemporary historical project. We relate to people living today with memories that are relevant now and stories that are being told now. The museum communicates and exhibits a number of ongoing, unfinished stories. It is very exciting to be allowed to take part in their continuation.

Av Ellen Lange, prosjektleder.
Skrevet til lanseringen på The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology 14. mars 2012.