99 pages • 3 hours read
Phillip M. HooseThe Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club
Nonfiction | Biography | YA | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 8-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “An Evening Alone”
After a meeting of the Churchill Club, Knud reflects alone in his room, which is filled with art supplies and covered with his paintings and drawings. Tonight, Knud is too preoccupied with thoughts of the war to focus on art. He tries to picture what his life would be like if Germany wins the war and the Danes become part of the “master race, with defeated people forced to work as slaves to satisfy their masters” (72). Knud plans to keep resisting even after a German victory.
Knud has no one with whom he can share his worries. He and Jens are too competitive to confide in each other. Børge is too young and Knud is not close with the other boys of the club. Knud wants to “open [his] heart” (73) to a pretty girl from his school, Grethe. He fantasizes a scene in which he is fighting Nazis in Budolfi Square with the Churchill Club and sees Grethe trapped at the top floor of a burning building. He stops the fantasy there, however, because he has no experience talking to girls. At his former all-boys school, he used to fight to achieve status, but has found this does not impress girls at the Cathedral School.
Knud reflects on a recent incident in which Jens kicked a German soldier at an ice skating ring, leading to the entry of his name in an official registry of those who oppose Nazis: “We of the Churchill Club were brave but naïve and undisciplined” (74).
Knud worries about reports from Eigil’s sister, a secretary with the Aalborg police, about an ultimatum the Germans have given to the Danish police—the local police must arrest the members of the Churchill Club or the Gestapo will find and punish the boys severely. Two elite professional investigators have been sent up from Copenhagen and witnesses have directed them to the Cathedral School. Eigil’s sister has been begging the club to stop and Eigil, the only Jewish boy in the group, has started to fear for the lives of his family. He becomes nervous: “Eigil had suddenly gone from pushing us to go out on missions every day to begging us to close down” (75). Knud refuses to halt the club’s activities.
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Nibe Offensive”
Without telling the others, Børge tries out a recruit from his hometown of Nibe, a 13-year-old boy. The boy is in police custody “within minutes” (77) after being caught painting the Churchill Club’s insignia around town. He is forced to wash the signs off the walls. As he scrubs, he becomes increasingly angry and plans his revenge. He proposes to Børge that they kill three German soldiers who man a remote outpost on the outskirts of their town.
The club is angry at Børge for recruiting someone in secret, but the members approve the plan. Knud helps to draw up an attack diagram, but he refuses to participate in the mission. He has planned an important attack on a railway yard for the same evening.
Børge arrives at the outpost with his recruit and another boy to stash their weapons. The German soldiers come out in their shirtsleeves, happy to see some visitors. They make friendly conversation with the boys, telling them about their grandchildren back home. Børge becomes conflicted after bonding with the men but feels he is duty-bound to go through with the mission. At night, however, when the boys lie in wait to shoot the Germans, the soldiers spread out. The Germans are armed, posted in separate positions, and located above the boys, making the plan look “more like a suicide mission than a carefully conceived assault” (80).
They boys wait for hours to escape, cold and terrified. They inch backward through the grass for a long time. Once they are inside, they argue, blaming each other. Børge angrily storms out and bicycles toward Aalborg to take part in the attack on the railway yard.
Chapters 8-9 Analysis
Chapter 8 is unique in that it is centered entirely on Knud’s solitary reflections. There are no action sequences or third-person narration by Hoose. This section heightens the effect of the other first-person passages, magnifying the experience of one teenager during the war, making history relatable.
In this section of reflection, Knud reveals motives and fears underlying his sabotage. Although he is one of the bravest boys of the club, always inclined to action, he worries about the war and the possibility of getting caught. He is also well aware that the club’s lack of discipline and caution can be a problem. Jens, who is generally more cautious than his brother, can also be reckless. He kicked a soldier at the ice skating rink, which will eventually help the police track him down as a member of the Churchill Club.
Knud discusses a romantic fantasy, a cinematic scene in which he sees Grethe trapped in a burning building amid a battle with the Nazis. His dream reveals that Knud is not ego-free; he cares about the impression his sabotage work makes on other people. While he views his participation in the club as noble work, part of Knud also wants it to impress girls. The fantasy also contains a childish attitude toward both war and romantic relationships, based more on fiction than reality.
With no one to talk to, Knud feels lonely. He is surrounded by friends, family, and fellow saboteurs, yet he is burdened with worries he cannot express to anyone else. A common feeling for people his age, it is further heightened by the stress of his secret and dangerous resistance activities. Knud’s disinterest in painting on this evening shows how war can threaten humanity by overshadowing even the strongest of passions.
Eigil, the only Jewish member of the Churchill Club, tends to express more fear and worry. While the other members of the club also put themselves at risk by resisting the occupation, Eigil and his sister are in particular danger. The Nazis want to kill all Jews, while they would live peaceably alongside Danes as fellow “Aryans” of the “master race” (17). While Knud is not completely insensitive to Eigil’s worries, he does not share in their intensity and refuses to cease the sabotage as Eigil pleads. If he were Jewish, he might feel differently, as Eigil points out later in Chapter 11.
In Chapter 9, the boys once again are confronted with the possibility of killing. As they amass more weapons, the tension surrounding the question of using them grows. The “Nibe Offensive” is a significant episode that highlights both the boys’ naïveté and the big scope of their ambitions, in addition to Børge’s impulsiveness. As the youngest member of the Churchill Club, Børge is sometimes ordered around by the older boys. By recruiting an even younger member to work under him, he may be trying to establish more of a leadership position for himself, but Børge and his 13-year-old recruit underestimate the gravity and difficulty of killing. Their mission is made more difficult after they have a conversation with their intended targets and develop empathy for them. Suddenly, the German soldiers are no longer merely the enemy; they are “three grandfathers” (79). According to Børge’s account of the mission, the soldiers’ physical positions made them more difficult to shoot, but it is likely that the boys also failed because, mentally and emotionally, they could not bring themselves to kill. This is another instance in the book when the abstractions of politics and war conflict with individual humanity, such as when Knud pities the young German soldiers he sees heading for Norway. Knud disdains the Nibe mission as being borne of petty feelings of revenge but he does not try to dissuade Børge. His ambivalence about the plan indicates some uncertainty in Knud about the goals and direction of the club.
