If Filip Gerhardsson (1923–2024) hadn’t come to a certain realization one day in 1943, this folk high school would have missed out on an outstanding student, and the region would have been without a skilled chief of police! That realization was that a 20-year-old young man saw no future in working with forestry and farming on the family homestead. It seemed far better to turn to books and education!
The records show that when Filip Gerhardsson applied to Vindeln Folk High School in 1943, he wrote that his motivation was his desire to remedy his “lack of social graces.” Incidentally, it was his older brother Gideon who inspired him to both this insight and the decision to act on it. Gideon had completed the school’s three-year program himself and believed that a life spent with shovel, saw, and plow on the family farm was not Filip’s proper element.
Filip applied and was accepted. He received a small amount of support from the municipality and his union (Forestry and Logging) and had saved a modest sum on his own. Meeting the school, he says, was “a mental revelation.”
“I came from an environment where it was believed that education was reserved for the children of better-off families. I’d always been curious and had what you might call an excellent photographic memory, making learning relatively easy for me. Now I entered the world of books, an extraordinary world! And the teachers were deeply devoted to their role as educators. There was also a focus on general character development. From my parents, my seven siblings and I were taught that one should pull one’s weight and similar values.”
“I can still recall the shivers of joy when I heard Carl Segerståhl standing at the front of the room, reciting Viktor Rydberg’s cantata with the lines: ‘What does it matter if the watchful eye glimpses how beyond the firmament a thousand suns are being burnished?’” (Here, Filip continues to recite a text he first heard seventy-two years earlier.) “And, of course, we read Nils Ferlin, who by that time had published three collections of poetry.”
Filip Gerhardsson has been awarded countless medals—four hundred in total—many for marksmanship as well as honors of distinction. But, he says, “The finest recognition I ever received was being voted the best classmate at the school. I was given ten kronor (equivalent to about 200 kronor today). It was all such an experience; the whole time at the school was extraordinary for someone who had spent his life alone in the woods and fields.”