Books: Buried Alive

FROM DAY TO DAY (485 pp.)—Odd Nansen—Putnam ($5).

At 7:30 p.m., Jan. 13, 1942, a Norwegian sheriff and two Germans walked up to Odd Nansen's house and arrested him. Odd was the son of Fridtjof Nansen, the famed Arctic explorer,* a well-known architect and a friend of Norway's royal family (which was his crime).

For nearly 3½years thereafter, Nansen descended the scale of German prisons. From the county jail, he was taken to the Gestapo prison in Oslo, thence to Grini concentration camp near by, and finally to sinister Sachsenhausen in Germany, where he existed for a year and a half. It was...