The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club

In Aalborg, Knud and Jens see that Denmark has radically changed. Shops that used to do business with Nazis are empty, now “stigmatized as traitors” (143). “Aalborg had become a hotbed of resistance” (144), with the monastery at the center. The covert British Special Operations Executive (SOE) helps Danish resisters, dropping weapons for them at prearranged spots. Danes smuggle guns and underground newspapers and put on massive labor strikes.

Knud notices that his mother has become “master of the house” (144). His father continues to give provocative sermons damning the Nazis, disregarding his parishioners’ warnings about antagonizing the Germans. One day, brandishing a revolver he received from the resistance, he accidentally discharges it and nearly shoots his wife.

Jens is focused on college and leaves for Copenhagen, but Knud has no interest in school and wants to rejoin the resistance. Depressed and lonely, Knud feels “totally lost”(145) without the Churchill Club. Seeing Grethe again, he finds that he no longer has any feelings for her.

Knud goes on a vacation with his parents to the seaside, where he meets Patricia Bibby, a 17-year-old British girl vacationing with her father. Patricia goes to Cathedral School and has befriended Gertrud Pedersen, Knud and Jens’ sister, as a way to meet Knud, whom she has admired from afar. Patricia found out from Gertrud where the Pedersens would be vacationing and convinced her father to go to the same town so that she can appear to meet Knud by chance. Patricia listens to Knud talk about his experiences, laughing at his anecdotes and encouraging him to “hold nothing back” (146). Both Knud and Jens fall in love with her and she becomes another object of their rivalry, although she does not get romantically involved with either. Patricia continues to talk to Knud and help him through his depression.

One night the monastery takes in a resister named Karl August Moeller, who is being pursued by the Gestapo. Karl telegraphs radio messages to the SOE every night from different addresses. Knud greatly admires him. They share Knud’s room and strike up a friendship, talking late into the night except for when they hear cars outside their window. For the first time, Knud feels terrified: “The old Churchill Club actions did not frighten me, but maybe prison changed me” (150). One night, Karl does not return to the monastery. Later, Knud finds out that Karl discovered that the whole Pedersen family was working in the resistance and asked to be transferred to keep them safe. Not long after, he is killed by the Gestapo.

Patricia, Knud’s sister Gertrud, and their friend Inger Van Hansen raise thousands of kroner for the underground resistance from local businessmen. Patricia stays away from her father to protect him. Once a week, she passes him in the churchyard without looking at or speaking to him to let him know she is still alive. Later, “in the winter between 1944 and ’45” (147), Patricia’s father dies, and she moves into the monastery.

Helge, “the Professor,” and Eigil go back to eleventh grade at Cathedral High School. Mogens is bored without the Churchill Club. Helge provokes a rant from a teacher who is a Nazi sympathizer. Eigil, relieved that his family has been spared and that he is free, is glad to return to school and to his girlfriend. Soon, however, he is recruited by the resistance, trained, and assigned to deliver sensitive messages. One night, running from the Gestapo, he jumps out of a window, breaks his leg, and is taken to a German-run hospital.

Knud yearns to join the SOE-led resistance but he is barred from it because he is considered a “security risk”(154). He hatches a plan to blow up a Gestapo building by placing explosives in a tunnel underneath. Knud goes to a city office building to ask for a map of the tunnels, where an SOE operative notices him and decides that it would be better to have Knud “on the inside” (154). Knud is assigned a leadership role in the strictly hierarchal resistance. The group’s job is to hide weapons and explosives. Knud receives training, finally learning to operate the weapons he stole with the Churchill Club. One day he is unpacking weapons in his father’s church when there is a knock on the door. Knud is scared, but it turns out to be a parishioner coming for choir practice. Knud tells him to let the other choir members know that practice is cancelled.

On May 4, 1945, Germany surrenders. Knud celebrates by singing hymns with his family and the resistance unit.