The journalist Tove Filseth worked as a secretary for the Nansen Relief organization for refugees and stateless persons in Oslo. She knew the Nansen family personally. In early 1939 she went to stay in Prague with Odd Nansen and his wife Kari. Nansen Relief had opened an office there to help on the ground in Czechoslovakia.
In the fall of 1939, Nansen Relief managed to get 37 Jewish children and baptized children of Jewish origin out of Prague and Bratislava to Norway. When German troops occupied Norway on April 9, 1940, Tove Filseth and her colleague Sigrid H. Lund destroyed the lists of the children’s names. In November 1942 Nansen Relief had to cease its work in Oslo and some of its documents were seized. A number of the children were able to escape to Sweden.
Tove Filseth had to leave Norway as well at the end of 1942. She went on working for Nansen Relief in Sweden. In Stockholm, she met the German Jewish writer Max Tau and married him in 1944.