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 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Grenades”
It is spring and final exams are approaching. Knud and the other boys are preparing to start highschool.
Uffe recruits three important new members from his model airplane building club. Alf Houlberg, his brother Kaj, and Knud Hornbo are factory workers in their early 20s. Alf tells Uffe that they have stolen six mortar grenades from the railway station near the factory, but they do not know how they work. He offers them to the Churchill Club.“The Professor” and Jens tinker with the grenades, trying to learn how to operate them. Finally, after a series of “near-suicidal experiments with explosives” (85), they figure out how to make the grenades ignite by lighting a small disc inside made of highly flammable magnesium.
The boys set aside two grenades for their “ultimate mission” (85), destroying the German vehicles in Budolfi square outside the monastery. First, they decide to do a “field test” (85) by blowing up boxcars containing German equipment at the rail yard. At the railway yard they unexpectedly come upon a couple kissing. The boys mock them until they leave. Alf and Uffe position themselves with pistols trained on German guards while Knud looks for a boxcar to ignite. He finds one full of airplane wings and design drawings, “a jackpot target of tremendous value to the Nazis” (86), and blows it up.
The railway yard mission is the club’s “biggest success so far, the destruction of a major German asset” (87). Danish firemen arrive to put out the fire. Despite the German soldiers’ commands, the firemen stall and work slowly, letting the fire damage more equipment: “For the first time in a long while we felt a stirring of pride in our countrymen” (87).
Chapter 11 Summary: “No Turning Back”
The boys live “in an atmosphere of fear” (89) after Eigil’s sister warns them that the police have honed-in on the Cathedral School as the hub of sabotage activity. The club gets into a bitter fight. Eigil accuses the others of endangering his family and insists they would feel the same way if they were Jewish. He demands they cease their sabotage. Jens sides with him against Knud and Børge, who insist they will not stop resisting and storm out.
Walking out of school with Helge, Knud notices an investigator watching them. The policeman is with a waitress from Café Holle, where the boys stole a gun from the coatroom. She has given a statement to the police with a physical description of the boys and identifies them for the investigator. The investigator follows the boys. When they try to run, he catches them and demands their identification cards. Later, he comes to the monastery and arrests Jens, who leads the policeman to their weapons cache in the cellar.
That night, all the boys of the club are arrested, as well as the three older factory workers. Børge, too young to be imprisoned, is held separately. At the police station, the boys are interrogated individually. Although they try to lie, the police find out everything by cross-examining them and bribing them with cigarettes late at night. By two in the morning, the boys sign written confessions.
Their parents are called to the station. They are shocked. Some are angry, but Knud and Jens’ parents are concerned foremost for the boys’ safety and do not reprove or punish them. They view “this family misfortune as one more example of the unhappiness that war brings” (93).
The boys are transported to King Hans Gades Jail, Aalborg’s city jail.
Chapters 10-11 Analysis
The attack on the railway yard is a milestone moment. Finally, Mogens’ work in the laboratory succeeds in giving the club explosives and it manages to destroy a boxcar of airplane wings, highly valuable assets. More importantly, the boys see the desired psychological effects of their work start to take hold as the Danish firemen disobey the German soldiers’ orders and let the damage worsen through their slow work. Knud, who has been feeling ashamed of his countrymen since the start of the occupation, is finally proud to see them start to resist, a direct consequence of his sabotage work.
Once again, personality differences lead to a clash at the start of Chapter 11. As investigators hone in on the club, tension thickens. Eigil, who is more nervous than the others due to his Jewish heritage and Jens, who is generally more cautious, argue with the “single-minded” (89) Knud and Børge. Eigil points out that they “would feel the same way […] in his shoes” (89).
The boys’ amateurism and deficiency of caution catches up with them as they are caught by police. A waitress who has seen them visiting the coatroom and conferring outside her café identifies them, indicating that the boys did not take enough precautions not to be noticed by witnesses. Although Knud says the boys are cocky at the station and give the police trouble by lying to them, it is not very difficult for the police to glean everything from them. The teenagers are no match for professional investigators and give up information in exchange for cigarettes.
Jens and Knud’s parents finally find out about their sabotage activities. Although the boys have been secretive and broken the rules, they have also upheld the values they were taught by their civic-minded parents, and Knud believes that the Pedersens understand: “[S]urely they were proud of us” (93). Margrethe and Edvard Pedersen view the boys’ arrest as a result of the conflict that occurs in wartime when hard decisions must be made between following rules and doing the right thing.
