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Tom Ross

Tom Ross' column appears Tuesdays and Sundays in Steamboat Today. Contact him at 970-871-4205 or tross@SteamboatToday.com.

Steamboat Springs — Leif Howelsen is more than the jovial Norwegian man who visits Steamboat Springs periodically during Winter Carnival.

He comes here to rekindle the longstanding affection between his late father, Carl, the ski jumping champion, and the community of Steamboat Springs. But Leif Howelsen is much more than an extension of his father. Leif, the son, survived a Nazi prison camp during World War II.

Now, we have a new documentary film, “Out of the Evil Night,” by Routt County filmmakers Cynthia A. Rutledge and F.M. Smokey Vandergrift, with narration by David Moran. The film allows Leif to tell his own story.

For the filmmakers, it was a story they felt compelled to share.

They worked periodically on the film during four years, without any outside funding.

“We aren’t going to take anything out of it,” Rutledge said. “Smokey and I decided that if we could do this, at least we could make a statement in our own way.”

Of course, it was Carl Howelsen who established Steamboat’s first Winter Carnival in 1914 and in the process, instilled a passion for competitive skiing that would lead to Steamboat’s proud Olympic tradition.

So, it comes naturally to view the elderly Leif (pronounced “life”) as his father’s alter ego. It just doesn’t do him justice.

I’ve written before about how, as a teenager during World War II, Leif was caught by the Nazi Gestapo while smuggling shortwave radios out of Oslo to the Norwegian resistance. The radios were rolled up in the boy’s sleeping bag.

I’ve tried to tell the story of how Leif endured many months, first in a prison in Oslo, and later in a concentration camp, expecting that every day might be his last.

It’s hard to put into written words the transformation that Howelsen underwent after the war — how he became a tireless advocate for world peace and understanding, a man who forgave his tormentors.

“I felt like I had been given my life,” Howelsen recalls in the film. “After a thing like that, you cannot be indifferent. You have to do something.”

For his generation, Howelsen said, that something was to begin building a different Europe.

The filmmakers have brought the story to life with painstakingly researched footage from World War II and gripping soundtracks. Of course, they interviewed Howelsen, both here in Steamboat Springs and in his native country. But what makes the film successful is a dramatic re-creation of Howelsen’s return to Germany to track down one of the SS prison guards who tormented him during his captivity.

After Oslo was liberated, the tables were turned, and Howelsen was assigned to guard the same men who had tormented him.

It’s understandable that Howelsen may have treated his prisoners harshly, but he was unable to live with the shame of it.

The film portrays how one of the prisoners begged Howelsen for water and he responded by dashing 10 liters of cold water into the man’s face.

“I could not deny what I’d done,” Howelsen said. “I had the same evil force inside me.”

After the war, Howelsen put aside any bitterness and visited the heart of Germany, staying in the homes of German families and making friends with them. He joined international organizations devoted to spreading the peace movement.

However, after 50 years had passed, Howelsen still was haunted by his own guilt about the lack of compassion he showed his former captors.

Howelsen ultimately went to the little German town of Hinterbach in search of Wilhelm Heilmann, not to show scorn for the former Nazi prison guard, but to apologize to him.

The climax of the film would not have been possible without Howelsen’s ability to return to the little towns in southern Germany, where he had traced the path of Heilmann a decade earlier. A few of those people, innkeepers and proprietors of a traditional butcher shop, willingly appeared on camera and participated in the re-enactment.

Heilmann’s daughter even returned to her father’s grave with Howelsen, where the Norwegian man who feels such a strong connection to Steamboat through his father, finally found his own inner peace.

Vandergrift said that in order to understand Leif Howelsen, you have to appreciate the internal moral compass his deeply religious mother instilled in him. That and the way his war experiences made him utterly committed to deepening understanding and friendship among peoples of different cultures.

“Leif believes there is a god inside each of us, and one must listen to it,” Vandergrift said. “He’s much better at hearing that inner voice than most people are.”

It’s a valuable Thanksgiving message that Rutledge and Vandergrift are sharing with us.