Born in Oslo, she studied nursing at its City Hospital and decided to become a “personal Christian,” dedicating her life to labor as a missionary nurse of the Covenanters, or Mission Covenant Church of Norway. The work was certain to be arduous, for the Covenanters sent their workers to such remote corners of the world as Lapland, the Congo or the interior of China. Annie, who has an almost mystical intensity of religious faith, had no qualms about her probable assignments. Besides, she looked about as large and indestructible as Michelangelo’s Moses, and possessed a temperament of ebullient good nature.
After serving successfully in several other missions, she was sent to China in the late 1930s. Establishing herself at a mission in Shensi, northeastern China, she was the only Western-trained medical worker among the 2,000,000 residents of this agricultural region. In all likelihood, she was the largest woman ever seen by the Chinese children under her care—over six feet, four inches tall, with a Valkyrie’s frame—but so gentle that none of the children were awed by her presence. Her appearance anywhere was a signal for laughter and games; she never seemed too tired to play with children and teach them little songs.
Invading Japanese armies passed within two miles of her mission and clinic in 1938, but none of the villagers ever betrayed the foreigner’s presence. She had a quick, retentive mind, and learned to speak Mandarin Chinese almost as well as she knew her own language. On the rare occasions when an English-speaking visitor reached the out-of-the-way settlement, he was surprised to find Sister Annie speaking his language quite capably. Throughout the war and into the postwar era, she continued to bring Christianity and expert medical care to her adopted people.
When the Communists seized control of China, however, the Christian missionaries were doomed. The Christian God became a hateful image in a shrine reserved for Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, and a beloved missionary nurse in a farming village was transformed into an enemy of the people. The commissars and their lackeys began by hedging Annie about with arbitrary regulations, then they confiscated medical supplies intended for her patients.
None of these measures succeeded in halting her work. Exasperated at their failure, the local party leaders finally dragged her before a kangaroo-style People’s Court. The word had been passed that any villager who arose to denounce her for crimes against the state would be handsomely rewarded. Not a single accuser appeared. Having lost face before the entire village, the Reds were more determined than ever to punish her.
If no one who knew Sister Annie could be lured into a denunciation of her, the obvious solution was to haul her off to a distant village where no one knew her. Having done this, the Reds threw her into jail as an object-lesson to anyone who befriended Christians. An old woman, knowing nothing of Annie but remembering the humane work of other missionary nurses in the village, begged the Communists to put her in jail with the foreign prisoner so that she could comfort her.
“Even the guards were kind to me,” Annie recalls. “The village people didn’t jeer at me or try to hurt me; they kept trying to pass food to me. They were loyal to the last minute!”
Under the relentless persecution and mistreatment, Annie’s strong body broke down, and in the summer of 1951, she was close to death from pneumonia and malaria. The Reds, who refused to let her leave the country when she was well, hurried to get rid of the ailing woman. Exhausted and gravely ill, she left China and returned to Norway for a long rest and the slow regaining of her normal health.