“I necessarily write with my heart…” Olivier Norek on his book “The Winter Warriors”

La Dépêche du Midi: Your work “The Winter Warriors” proves that history repeats itself since what happened in Finland in 1939 echoes the current war in Ukraine…

Olivier Norek: There are two sentences that I really like, “History stutters” and “Forgotten history is doomed to repeat itself”. What is important in this book is also to see that history does not have time to change that much. If tomorrow we go to war, it will not be a drone war where we press buttons remotely. It will be like in the Gaza Strip or in Ukraine, in the trenches, we will see the look of those we are fighting against and we will feel their breath when we are in hand-to-hand combat.

How will the episode of the Second World War that your book recounts impact the course of the conflict?

It’s early 1940, Hitler is trying to make the English kneel and he makes this incredible mistake, characteristic of these great psychopaths who are very sure of themselves. He launches a double front with 4.5 million soldiers who should have invaded England. And since Finland has managed to prove that the Soviet Union was a colossus with feet of clay, he activates Operation Barbarossa to conquer it. Which means that today, absolutely no one knows what we owe to the sacrifice of these 70,000 children of Finland. But what we are sure of is that Europe, France, the world would have a very different face. And I, who was a cop for 18 years, therefore the armed wing of Justice on philosophical, moral and physical levels, this injustice affects me and has only crystallized the need and the desire to tell this story.

As you say, “some stories meet you and leave you no choice”?

Exactly. The story happened, it moved all the furniture inside me, it said: “I live here, so you do as you wish, either you tell me or you don’t tell me, but as long as you don’t tell me I’ll stay here.” And that’s what happened to me for the Calais jungle with “Entre-deux mondes” (2018) but also for “Impact” (2022). I can’t write to order, I have to write with my heart. It’s like a fire that makes me inhabited by the subject and we don’t cheat on that.

How did you make the story your own?

In fact, it is a war that is not mine, soldiers who are not my brothers, a country that is not mine and yet I have found all the necessity and interest in talking about it because their war is our history. And on top of that, they have been badly screwed over with this story of soldiers that we had promised to send them when our only interest was the iron ores of Norway and Sweden. So again an injustice, so again for me an inability to ignore this subject.

Nor next to the figure of the Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä (1905-2002) whose story brings us closer to the realm of the mystical…

He nearly died four times in 48 hours and four times death refused to open its doors to him and four times his friends saved him. We almost touch, of course, obviously on the mystical. Nobody explains how Simo remains lying down for 6 hours at -50 degrees. It is physically impossible. Nobody explains how Simo shoots at 490 meters, that is to say where there he does not see. Only because Simo shot with his soul, with his heart and he sublimated himself. And, for their part, the Soviets who nevertheless have 27 ethnic minorities in their ranks with as many beliefs, consider him an immortal, a supernatural being. His name alone makes entire units of Soviet soldiers retreat.

Like Ukrainians today, the Finns have shown inventiveness…

Poverty breeds inventiveness. So the first thing they did was not to fight the Soviets but to go and steal their weapons because they didn’t have any. They will succeed in being nothing but nature, nothing but forest by dressing in white, by being totally invisible in their environment. They had this Sisu, this strength and this deep love for their country of barely 3 million inhabitants and which will puff out its chest in front of a continent country of 171 million inhabitants by telling them: “We are not afraid and we will not let ourselves be done.”