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 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “To Arms”
By the spring of 1942, the Churchill Club has twenty members, active and passive. Uffe Darket, a friend of Eigil’s, joins and becomes an important member. Knud and Jens continue to hide their activities from their family, which is made easier by their parents’ absorption in church work and the boys’ isolated rooms in the monastery. Mogens, or “the Professor,” continues his attempts to create a small explosive, using a room at the monastery as a lab. The other boys tease him about his failure to produce a bomb thus far. The boys often taunt each other and bicker but remain united: “[F]aith in each other and our mission held us together” (55).
Knud spots a rifle hanging unattended in the window of a German barrack. The boys decide they must snatch it in daylight when the barracks are empty. When they arrive to steal it, they are startled by the presence of a German soldier. Knud steals the rifle while the German is distracted with cleaning a window, Børge wraps the rifle in a raincoat, and Mogens Thomsen bicycles away with it. Knud notices a postman and two women watching and realizes they must have seen the whole thing.
The rifle is an important acquisition for the boys. The club discusses whether it should continue with its strategy of property defacement or acquire a cache of weapons to use against the German occupiers. They decide to shift their focus to weapons while continuing to destroy property. They reason that they will need the weapons to “cover each other” as their “operations increased in scale and complexity” (58). Knud fantasizes about sharing the weapons with British troops when they come to liberate Denmark. The boys make a list of places where they can steal them.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Whipped Cream and Steel”
Aalborg is full of German soldiers, who use it as a resting place after fighting on the brutal eastern front and as a base for shipping off to Norway. Knud feels sorry for the German soldiers he sees shipping out: “Many of them didn’t seem much older than us”(62). The Germans are “crazy” (64) about the cafés, restaurants, and famous pastry shops of Aalborg. The Churchill Club takes advantage of this to rifle through the coatrooms to steal soldiers’ guns. The club begins to acquire an “arsenal of stolen knives, guns, and bayonets” (62).
Knud steals a machine gun from a German barrack, the “club’s biggest triumph of all” (66). Back at the monastery, however, he realizes he has no magazine. Without it, “the bloody thing is useless” (67). Knud points out that the incident highlights the boys’ inexperience with weapons. The next day Knud goes back to the barracks and steals a bag with magazines, also taking a box that turns out to contain a soldier’s dirty underwear.
The boys love to practice shooting with the guns. Several times, they accidentally discharge them, nearly shooting each other. Knud and Jens practice shooting in the loft of the monastery during their father’s church services, timing their shots with the swelling sounds of the organ to avoid detection.
The club decides it is too risky to keep the whole arsenal of weapons in one place. They settle on hiding them in Helge’s family’s garden. They tape them to his body and stuff them into his clothes. Helge has to make a dangerous crossing of Limfjorden Bridge, which has two German checkpoints. The other boys watch nervously. The bulk of the weapons seems obvious through Helge’s clothes, but he makes it past the German soldiers.
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
In these chapters, the boys engage in increasingly dangerous sabotage. Most Significantly, they start to collect a cache of weapons and target cafés, two strategies that will eventually lead to their capture and worsen their punishment. They engage in high risk activities, such as stealing a rifle in broad daylight while several witnesses watch, raiding coatrooms in close proximity to soldiers, and playing with guns, accidentally discharging them and nearly killing each other. These incidents show that, though the club makes some effort at caution, they are often reckless. Some of these mishaps can be attributed to the club’s lack of military discipline and knowledge, an issue Knud addresses in this chapter. The club has no hierarchal organization, he says, and the boys are competitive and sarcastic with each other. The club is held together by faith in a common cause rather than discipline, as with official armies. Although the club will accomplish a great deal on the strength of its belief in the resistance, its deficiency of caution and unprofessionalism will eventually lead to its downfall.
Knud’s vision of sharing the weapons with his British liberators is another expression of his innocence and lack of military training—though he is keen on acquiring weapons, he cannot imagine using them himself.
In a significant moment in Chapter 6, Knud locks eyes with one of the witnesses of their raid on the barracks; in that moment, he does not know whether he can rely on the Danish woman to keep quiet about what she saw and is forced to place his trust in her. The moment highlights in miniature some of the conflict broiling among Danish society during the occupation and also foreshadows the boys’ eventual capture based on a tip from a witness to one of their gun raids.
While the Pedersens are generally a close family, Knud and Jens become increasingly detached from their parents and siblings. They do not attend their father’s church services in favor of practicing shooting and keep their sabotage activities a secret from them. Their parents trust them, giving them a great deal of freedom and time to themselves, in contrast to many American parents from comparable backgrounds today.
