Fifty Seconds

Ingrid is a guide at the National Museum in Oslo. Two mornings a week she stands in front of The Scream with a school group behind her, and she tells them how it was stolen.

It happened on the twelfth of February, 1994. That morning the Winter Olympic Games opened in Lillehammer, and most of the country was watching television. The painting hung in the old National Gallery then, next to a window on the second floor.

Two men put a ladder against the wall. They broke the window, climbed in, took the painting and went back down the ladder with it. They were inside for about fifty seconds. The gallery was open to the public that day, but the men never used the door.

The police searched for three months. In May the painting was found in a hotel south of Oslo. It was not damaged. Four men went to prison, and one of the criminals was a former football player, so for a while his name was in every Norwegian newspaper.

Today the original hangs behind glass, in a room with cameras in the ceiling and a guard by the door. Ingrid has told this story more than a thousand times, and the children always ask the same question: how did the men get in?

A ladder, she says. Then she tells them the last part. The men left a card in the empty space on the wall, and the card said:

“Thanks for the poor security.”