ENGLISH TOURIST WHO HELPED JEWS FLEE THE NAZIS

Unsuspecting Myrtle Wright, 37, arrived in Oslo in April 1940 on her way to a Quaker meeting in Copenhagen. Three days later, the Nazis invaded Norway and, despite many legal attempts to leave, the Englishwoman was trapped in the country.

What happened next changed the course of history for hundreds of Jews whom she helped escape almost certain death. Stranded and alone, Myrtle swept her fears aside to become part of the underground resistance that was largely run by women, including key figure Sigrid Helliesen Lund, a 48-year-old mother of two. The daring group received coded messages which allowed them to warn their Jewish neighbours and help women and children to safety - while jeopardising their own.

It's one of the little-known tales about the Norwegian resistance which I tell in my new book Norway's War: A People's Struggle Against Nazi Tyranny, 1940-1945.

And Myrtle, who was awarded King Haakon VII's Freedom Cross for her outstanding services to the country in 1946, is one of its unassuming but heroic figures.

A practising Quaker and full-time member of the Society of Friends in England, Myrtle was on her way to talks with the Danish Society of Friends when her journey was held up by bad weather. Within three days the Germans had invaded and life would never be the same again.

Not able to comprehend the horrors and dangers that lay in store living under Nazi rule, she made several fruitless attempts to leave the country legally. During her dealings with the German bureaucracy, her passport was taken and severe restrictions placed on her travel.

Other than that, Myrtle was left to her own devices. Given the patronising chivalry adopted by the national socialists, no woman - not even an Englishwoman - was considered a potential danger to the planned Nazi revolution in Norway.

So, for the next four years, she found herself living in Occupied Norway with a suitcase she had packed for a two-week trip. Through a friend who was also a Quaker, resistance leader Sigrid learnt of Myrtle's plight and invited her to move into the family home in Vinderen, an offer which she gratefully accepted. Apart from a young son, Erik, born with Down's Syndrome, the whole Lund family - Diderich the husband and Bernt, their sixteen-year-old son - was active in the resistance in various ways. Inevitably, Myrtle was drawn into these activities.

On the night of October 25, 1942, an anonymous caller telephoned the house and delivered a simple but enigmatic message: "There's a big arrangement on tonight. But we're only taking the big packages."

Sigrid and Myrtle tried to puzzle out what the message meant. Selskap (meaning arrangement or gathering in English) was a code that warned of trouble; but what could "big packages" mean? Finally the two women had it: the caller, almost certainly a patriotic policeman, was informing them that the arrest of the Jews was imminent, but that only Jewish men - "the big packages" - were to be taken.

Phone calls were monitored, hence the need for code. Sigrid left at once and spent the night going round her Jewish acquaintances, spreading the news and urging people to go into hiding instantly. Myrtle stayed at the house to receive those people for whom no immediate hiding places could be found.

Myrtle's diary entry for November 23 - her birthday - describes how, in the midst of those terrible times, she and Sigrid tried hard to maintain a sense of normality in their daily lives.

The two women, with the family dog Tasso, took the tram to Frognerseteren and went for a four-hour walk in Nordmarka. Tryvannstua's ski run was not yet snow-covered, but the lake was frozen. They watched young boys skating there while sipping ersatz coffee made of sugar beet. Two days later, the doorbell rang and Sigrid opened the door to a stranger who delivered another coded warning: "There's a big arrangement tonight. We're taking the small packages this time", before turning and walking back into the street.

Having cracked the code on the earlier occasion, the women knew Sigrid would once again be spending most of the night out ringing on doorbells and trying to warn as many Jewish families as possible to make ready to leave instantly, as well as telephoning around to organise safe houses. While Sigrid was out, Myrtle would remain at the house in Vinderen to receive those sent by Sigrid to wait in hiding, while safe houses were found for them.

Sigrid later described to Myrtle how her first call had been to the wife and three children of the rabbi of Oslo, Isak Julius Samuel, at Meltzers gate 3.

Rabbi Samuel had been arrested earlier and taken to the prison camp at Grini to await transportation. Luckily, Sigrid was able to take the two older children to safe homes without incident - but was almost caught as she was moving the third child, three-year-old Amos, whom she was taking to a separate safe house on Colbjørnsons gate.

To keep people off the streets and forestall such attempts to subvert the operation, the Germans had adopted the tactic of sounding air raid sirens at frequent intervals throughout the night. As Sigrid was walking down Meltzers gate with Amos and passing the Swedish embassy, a jeep cruised by with a revolving searchlight mounted on the roof.

As the beam swept towards her, she dropped to the pavement, pulled her coat over little Amos and covered her head with her elbows. She could almost feel the light as it brushed over her. Then the jeep was gone, she stood up and they continued the journey to safety.

Realising that another prime target for the arrests would be the children living in the Jewish Children's Home in Holbergs gate 21 in central Oslo, she then made her way there. She had personally brought some of them to the apparent safety of Norway three years earlier, as part of a group of 37, in the fatal lull between the German entry into Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and the invasion of Norway on April 9, 1940. Most had been housed with foster parents outside Oslo, but fourteen remained at the home.

On arrival, she found her friend Nic Waal, who had driven to Holbergs gate after having the same thought. Between them, the two women and the children's "foster-mother", Nina Hasvoll, managed to spirit the children to safety just hours before the operation to collect the "small packages" got under way.

Nic Waal made three trips in total, with the children hiding under rugs and cushions on the backseat of the car. With the air raid sirens still wailing at frequent intervals, she was stopped in her first trip by soldiers at a checkpoint on Hegdehaugsveien.

She bluffed her way past them, angrily pointing to the sticker on her windscreen that showed she was a doctor out on business and fully entitled to be on the streets. In Alltid Underveis (Always on the move), her memoir of the times, Sigrid writes that most of those who agreed to hide Jewish families in their homes, always at huge personal risk, were "older women living alone".

Pressure on the "export businesses", as the transports into Sweden were known, was intense at the time and those in hiding had to wait weeks and often months before their turn came. There was also the added burden of extra mouths to feed in already hard times, and of doing so without arousing the suspicions of an unsympathetic neighbour, who could report them to the authorities.

On January 27, 1944, Wright was woken at 6.30am by two Gestapo members who had come to arrest Sigrid's husband, Diderich Lund. Thankfully, he had already been warned and fled. The Gestapo left - but not before rebuking the women for the portrait of King Haakon VII that hung on the living room wall - pictures of the Norwegian royal family were forbidden.

The visit served as a warning to the brave women that Tuengen allé was no longer a safe place to live. They moved to a secret address, and on February 10 made their daring escape by nightfall.

The two women were among a party of refugees who trudged in silence through the moonlit and snow-dense forests, before crossing the border into the safety of neutral Sweden. It was the same route they had helped so many others find refuge through.

Myrtle remained a close friend of the Lund family for the rest of her life and returned to Norway many times. It is incredible to think that her three-day trip turned into a perilous four year rebellion. In 1951, she married a fellow Quaker, Philip Radley. The couple remained together for the next 40 years, dying within a year of each other in Cambridge, the city where Myrtle's ordinary - and yet quite extraordinary - life had begun.