Author talk with Jan Bergsten who talks about his latest book "When the war took the train".
During the Second World War, 2.2 million German soldiers took the train through the country. The German armed forces also sent 100,000 wagonloads of war material through neutral Sweden.
The transit through Sweden was secret for a long time, but then the archives were opened and the old documents reveal so much. Jan Bergsten's new book "När kriget tog togget" (When the war took the train) tells about what happened when the German trains came to Jörn. They were not allowed to continue to Boden.
Jan Bergsten was born in 1953 in the parish of Markbygden and has written about ten books related to rail traffic and railroad life. Two years ago, during the Storytelling Festival in Jörn, he told about being a child of the railroad in Jörn between 1957 and 1967.
His writing is mostly linked to the railways and mainly non-fiction, but he also wrote two historical novels about two women connected to the railways, about the rallarkockan Svarta Björn and the lokföraränkan Agnes.
This is how Jan Bergsten describes his writing when he was presented as the Minerva member of the month within the Swedish Writers' Union:
"I grew up in a railway family, the youngest of six siblings and where most of them were born in railroad guard cabins along the main line through upper Norrland. My father started out as a railroad guard and ended up as a superintendent. What I'm trying to portray is life by the railroad, but also what rolled and rolls on it."
