The Rebuilding

Close your eyes and transport yourself back nearly 100 years. Imagine that all the buildings around you have been levelled to the ground and that their ashes cover the town like a gloomy blanket. That was the experience that awaited the first people to travel home to Hammerfest after liberation day on the 8th of May 1945. Imagine the deafening silence and the empty streets. The town looked, so small, naked, so elusive. Luckily the people of Hammerfest don’t give up easily, they had overcome disasters many times before. When the town celebrated its 100-year anniversary in 1889, it obtained the following motto «Industria hominum naturam vincit», “The Industry of men can defeat nature”. Both the town fire and the Nazi burning of the town evoked an unprecedented power in the hardy population, who rebuilt the town with courage and determination, everyone working together from the top ranks to the common man. The first people to return sacrificed everything to help. There were no houses, no solid rooves or isolated walls. The sea and the roads were contaminated with mines , food supplies unstable and access to materials reduced and delayed. They experienced snow that settled in October that year, but with frozen hands, they built the quays, cleared the roads and harbours, repaired the network, built barracks, and washed their clothes in ice cold streams. They were the first, but others soon followed, and it took a whole 15 years before the houses and infrastructure were returned to normal.