There was war and insecurity, but father and mother stayed at their post with the Chinese.

Mother and father had first settled in the north to learn the language and get used to the church work. They were stationed with Lutheran missionaries. For some reason the leader was a Baptist. These practices are well known, to adult Baptist. This would later become a problem for my parents. In June 1940, they travelled out to the coast to the city of Tientsin. I was born there on 14 June 1940.

This is how the world found out that I was born.

When they returned to the station in the north, Father wanted me to be baptised as he was used to. But no, he was told that if he were to baptise me, he would also have to baptise the Chinese children, and that was completely out of the question among the Baptists.

Therefore mother and father decided to leave this mission and travel south. Father was promised a position in an American mission. He would now have his work there.

But it wasn't to be.

Mother never grumbled about it, at least she couldn't tell me what really happened when her dear husband was shot. Only after my godfather Esther Olson came to visit after Mother had died, and I finally heard the whole story.

Father was a man in his prime when he was shot.

Esther had also been present when Father lost his life. Then I got my answers to all the questions.

They were on their way south, to the Lutheran congregation they were going to serve. First they took the train a long way off. Then they continued by boat. They sailed for over a week and then they had to move on with handcarts.

Later, one evening they came to the city of Shenkiu. The entourage consisted of Inger and Gerhard Danielsen, the little daughter and two Norwegian female missionaries. They arrived late, so the city gate was already closed. Therefore they took refuge for the night in an inn by the road outside the city. It was November 28. They were tired and quickly fell asleep.

In the middle of the night, they were awakened by noise. Then the soldiers, or should we call them the robbers, burst open the door with firearms in their hands. It was completely dark, there was no electricity. The robbers supplied themselves with the luggage. Father jumped out of bed and stood in front of me. What the Japanese who stormed in were thinking then and there at the moment, no one knows. Maybe they thought that Father was hiding a weapon behind him.

Nobody knows.

But in any case they shot him down with several shots, in the stomach and in the head. Then they took the bicycle with them, as well as a lot of the luggage, including all the medical equipment.

The three women were left completely helpless. He never regained consciousness.

Father's grave in China

The next day they found the suitcases and what the robbers had taken with them. Therefore, it was assumed that they were not ordinary robbers, but plainclothes soldiers on patrol.

Mother wrote a letter from Shenkiu about what had happened: “We had travelled by rail for a day and a half, by rickshaw for two days, and by boat over a flooded area for eight days. We probably had two days left with handcarts and rickshaws before we arrived at the first mission station in the field. We had travelled this distance in one day. But we encountered so many obstacles on the way that we did not reach the place where we intended to spend the night. We therefore had to stop outside of a small village. There were no house rooms to be had in the village, but we were given rooms in a home just outside.

We ate, set up the camp beds, took care of ourselves and went to bed. I read Psalm 62, and we prayed together and surrendered to the Lord.

At two o'clock I woke up from a terrible dream and that a number of dogs were barking violently. I realised something was up, but before I was fully awake, there was a knock on the door. The next moment it was broken open, and three or four men stood before us. I cannot give any description of what happened. Gerhard gave them his wallet and asked what they wanted. He had a money belt around his waist, which they didn't get. At the same time, he tried to block the way towards little AnWei. It was probably this that annoyed them.

They probably thought he was going to pick up a weapon. Then they shot him down with several shots, so that he died almost instantly.

The time was then between 2.15 and 2.30 at night. It was pitch-black. The robbers tried to take something with them, but most of the suitcases were too heavy for them, so they only took a few smaller ones, which, by the way, were found again on the country road.

They also took a bicycle.

As soon as they had left, we lifted Gerhard onto a bed, but we were unable to stop the bleeding. What little we had of instruments and medicine, the attackers had taken with them. I couldn't get an answer out of him, so I think he was unconscious the whole time. At 3.30 he went home to God.

It is impossible to understand, but the Lord allowed it to happen, and I can only testify in the fact that His way is best. I can only thank you for the time I got with him. The Lord will give us, strength. Little AnWei is now in the Lord's hand.”

Perhaps it is easy to understand that for all these years later in life I have felt that my father sacrificed his life for my sake. Had he not stood in front of me to protect me, we don't know how things would have turned out.

What happened in my first year of life, I have tried to clarify as much as possible. Therefore, I will also include how others experienced it all. Cora Martinson was one of the missionaries with whom Father was to become a colleague. She worked with her brother, whose name was Harold. He was at a field station, and Cora was alone at home when it happened, as she tells here: “One day when I had just come back from my schoolwork, there was a loud knock on the door. I opened the door and there stood a very shabby dressed soldier.

He handed me a folded paper. It was a telegram, but the paper was so crumpled and dirty that I had difficulty deciphering it.

I did not understand the significance of this. So I went out to the teachers and said, "Can you read this to me?" One of them read: "Pastor Tan killed by robbers, the other four are fine." I did not understand who this "Tan" was.

I couldn't think of anyone who had the Chinese name of Tan. That's why I called Kioshan. I had to go to a public office to call Dr. Skinsnes in Kioshan, because there was no telephone on the mission's premises. For some reason we could hardly hear each other.

Mother and I on father's grave a year after requesting an excavation.

Finally, we gave up the attempt.

I went back to the teachers and said, "What do you think this means?" They didn't understand it either.

I decided to get hold of a man with a bicycle, ask him to take a letter from me and the telegram and go to the outstation where my brother Harold was. It was approx. 60 miles away. Harold always left an indication of where he was at any given time. I wrote him a note saying, "Harold, what does this mean? Tan, who is it? I can't figure it out." Then the man rode off.

I sat back and pondered. Then suddenly a light came on for me. It was a Norwegian family named Gerhard Danielsen. The first syllable in Danielsen could easily be Tan. The Chinese usually take the first syllable of our names and try to adapt it to one of their one hundred authentic surnames. My surname is Martinson, in Chinese it became Ma, which means horse.

Earlier, our association had received a letter from the Danielsens. They were a Norwegian Lutheran couple from the China Inland Mission. Pastor Danielsen had received his training in England and had been sent out by the China Inland Mission. CIM does it this way: Lutherans to one place, Baptists to another, Methodists to a third. So he should have worked with a senior Lutheran missionary. But for some reason, he ended up with Baptists. CIM had this system that older missionaries taught the new ones.

Later, the Danielsens had their first child. Then Pastor Danielsen said: "I can't live with this. I have to baptise my child! If I baptise my child, I also have to baptise the Chinese children." This problem bothered him quite a bit, so he decided to resign. He wrote to our mission asking if he could join our group.

Our mission had said yes, so he and his family, as well as Esther Olson and Gladys Anderson, were to come to our field in Junan.

Junan had never been bombed, so it seemed a safe place for them. Now they were on their way to our station. As they travelled, it had become dark and the porters would go no further. They do not like to travel in the dark.

This group of travellers tried to find a place to spend the night in the city, but the city gates were already closed. At last they found an inn outside the city wall. All five were in a large room at this inn.

Everyone fell asleep except Esther. She couldn't sleep. She heard footsteps around the house, the sound of gravel crunching underfoot. She became more and more anxious. Sometime after midnight there was a loud knock on the door. Everyone jumped up.

Gerhard opened the door, and in came soldiers in uniform. The soldiers began to rob. Gerhard had a good amount of money sewn into a belt around his waist, but he gave the soldiers the money he had in a purse. Then the soldiers began to walk around the foot of the bed looking for more valuables. They took the suitcases and whatever else they could get with them. At the foot of the bed lay Danielsen's five-month-old daughter. Gerhard was afraid they would take the child, so he blocked the way. The soldiers shot him down as he stood, with several shots to the head, stomach and shoulder. He fell down right in front of his wife. Two of the women were nurses, both Inger, his wife, and sister Gladys Anderson. But they could do nothing for him. That was the end. The soldiers grabbed the suitcases and ran.

That was it! Gerhard had been killed. This was the message. When Harold got the message, he immediately jumped on his bicycle and went to the town mentioned in the telegram.

There he quite correctly found both ― Inger, the two women and the baby. By this time I had a suspicion of what it was all about. I went over to Harold's house and found some baby things that had belonged to someone else's missionary child. I saved up a crib and got a couple of rooms ready for them to stay in. They lived with us for about seven months.”

Cora Martinson continues: "The funeral for Gerhard was held in Kioshan. He was buried in the same cemetery as my father. On the day he was buried, the baby was also baptised. Esther and I were godparents. We stayed in Kioshan for a few days, and there it was decided that the three women and the baby would stay with us. There the women could continue their language studies in peace, because Junan had never been bombed.

We travelled back to Junan in wheelbarrows, all except Harold, who had a bicycle. By order of the government, the roads had been dug up criss-cross in all directions to prevent the Japanese from advancing. So using a bus was completely impossible. As we approached the city at sunset, we saw a row of something where the city wall used to be. I asked my wheelbarrow driver, "What the hell is that?" He said, "There are government grain wagons going to the front." I said, "Ah, what a target for the planes. The Japanese will love to get them."

The very next morning, when we were sitting at the breakfast table, the planes arrived. It was then eight o'clock.

The Japanese bombed from 8 to 12. They continued all the time to bomb the grain wagons. The planes seemed to sweep right over our house, then swoop down over the grain wagons. The bombs whistled whooooooo, and then it was a big boom. We didn't know where they wanted to bomb. That's why we sat close together in the basement all these hours. Here these women came to live with us, precisely because our city had not been bombed, and then they ended up in the middle of it!

Now the Japanese had taken the city of Sinyang, but the city walls there still stood. The Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek had ordered the demolition of all city walls.

But the Japanese took Sinyang before the people had put the order into practice. Tearing down the city walls in Junan was a traumatic experience for people, because the walls were very high and very thick, and they had been there for over 300 years.

Why did Chiang want to tear down the walls?

Because the moment the Japanese moved into a city that was surrounded by city walls, they would put cannons on top of the wall. They had planes and they had guns. Since there was still a Chinese population in the city, the Nationalists could not bomb the city, as it would affect their own people as well. In this way, the Japanese felt completely safe.

When the wall in Junan was torn down, you should have seen the people. Everyone was there — old and young, big and small, women and men; they all took part in tearing down their wall. They cried because they had never been attacked by robbers, they had always been protected by the wall. They felt so safe with the wall. But it had to go down.

Sinyang was about 90 miles south of us and the city was occupied by the Japanese. Kikungshan, where my mother and Lydia lived, was 30 miles south of Sinyang. Periodically the Japanese would come out to loot and get food. We got letters from my mother through the lines until the Japanese came to loot. Then all mail was stopped.

We still knew a little about what happened. The Chinese had established a line of communication from the city of Sinyang. For example, a man could sit outside the city and look like he was taking off a hat. Within his line of sight, another sat reading the newspaper. Within his line of sight again, another man was sitting eating lunch. That way there was contact all the way to Junan. As soon as the Japanese began to march, the signal would go from man to man. It was our telegraph system. The telephone lines had been knocked down.

All the bus routes had been dug up into ditches that were approx. 9 feet wide and 10 feet deep. They criss-crossed in all directions.

This is how they wanted to prevent the Japanese advance. But this communication system worked very well.”

It wasn't until the year after my mother died that I got a visit from my godfather Esther Olson from the USA. As previously mentioned, she had also been present when my father was shot. She was able to answer all my questions. Esther could tell that mother prayed for the soldiers after they had shot father. She said: "We must forgive them, they were under command."

For all these years, I have wondered how Mother could be so confident. There she sat alone with a small child. Her husband had just been shot, and then she manages to pray for the assailants.

The day after Father was buried, I was baptised. We had to make use of the priest while he was there. They had decided that my name would be Astrid. To get the G in Gerhard, I was called Gro. In addition, the Chinese called me AnWei, which means "Comfort". I was supposed to be my mother's comfort.

Mother and I in detention pure in Tsimo.

We had a good time in Junan, and eventually Mother was also allowed to start working a little. When we reached the end of the summer, the ravages of the Japanese were approaching, and we were advised to get out to the coast. We travelled to Tsingtao, where Mother began working at the Lutheran Hospital.

We were stationed here when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Thus, the United States and Japan were at war, and all foreigners were seen as potential enemies. The next day, i.e. 8 December 1941, we were interned at the mission station. We had a small radius of movement, and guards were around us around the clock.

We were later sent to an internment camp in Tsimo. This was apparently a smaller camp, and I was so small, so I don't remember anything about that time.

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