The Boys Who Challenged Hitler Read online

  They were issued three skimpy meals a day. Breakfast was three slices of rye bread. Lunch was porridge. Dinner was usually a small portion of hot food. The boys quickly lost weight. “One day when I was extremely hungry I asked a guard if I could have a portion more,” Eigil later wrote. “He replied angrily that we were not meant to become obese. He took away my meal. I lost twenty kilos [forty-four pounds] in the first month or two.”

  They followed a harsh daily routine. A clanging bell at six o’clock jarred them awake and sent them scrambling to their feet. They relieved themselves, washed their floors, and gobbled breakfast. Work started at seven. They worked ten hours a day in their cells, monotonously sorting mountains of postcards from the prison’s print shop into bundles of twenty-five. They continued working until six in the evening. Every two weeks they got a hot shower. On Sundays the boys were offered the opportunity to go to church. Back home they had eagerly skipped Reverend Pedersen’s church services to practice shooting the machine gun in the monastery loft, but now they jumped at any chance for a break from prison tedium. Each of the seven boys sat alone in an enclosed booth, each booth angled so that they could see the priest but not one another.

  Each boy reacted to imprisonment in his own way. Eigil struggled to stave off feelings of despair. “I missed my mates,” he later wrote. “The loneliness was very great. In my thoughts I convinced myself that I had done the right thing by taking part in the fight against the Germans. But in the many lonely hours came the doubt anyway, often very insidious. There was no one to talk to besides myself. The light in the cell was turned off at 9 p.m. Many times I lay in my bed and struggled with the temptation to give up, to take a razor blade and slit my wrists to stop the beating of my heart. It would not be discovered until 4 a.m., I told myself.”

  By contrast, Uffe Darket seemed to possess an inner cheerfulness even in the darkest of circumstances. When the others would sit on their cots despondently staring out their barred windows at the dingy snow, they could often hear Uffe singing his favorite song, which began, “There will be flowers in the window where my loved one will be living.”

  Knud Pedersen had no intention of taking his life, but he was far too angry to sing.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: I did not adjust. I regarded the Danish jailers as German cooperators and traitors. I was in enemy land. I was punished again and again at Nyborg. Mostly they took away things. They took away my drawing materials and books from the prison library. For a month they took away “happy hour,” between eight and nine at night, the one time I could talk to my mates. Once I threw a bucket of water onto a guard’s backside when he wasn’t looking. He never forgave me. I smashed my own pocket watch onto the prison floor. They repaired it and sacked me five workdays. I was punished for keeping an unclean cell, for not obeying orders, for talking to my friends when ordered to shut up. And I was an easy target. I was too tall to hide behind anyone else.

  They tried to strip away your identity and play with your mind. There was one little guard, pudgy and red-faced, who really hated me. He would jingle his keys outside my cell. The sound would drive me crazy, because I knew the person jingling them was free. He also had his spy hole in the door. I always had the feeling I was being watched.

  One night when I was in bed I saw a mouse in my cell, illuminated by the moonbeam on the floor. It was just sitting there looking at me. I was terrified. I jumped up on the bed, screaming. Guards came running. When they realized what was going on they doubled up in laughter. I yelled back, “You can laugh only because you have guns on you. You are safe!” They slammed the door and gathered outside to watch my misery through their peephole. “That mouse is gonna get you, 28!” the chubby guard cackled. The mouse scuttled softly around the radiator pipes and seemed to try to settle in for the night. I heard every move it made. I wrapped my sheet around my head to block out the sound, but even that didn’t work. The next morning Uffe came in, trapped the poor animal, and took it away.

  My obsession with Grethe got worse. Now she was a goddess to me, occupying my thoughts and dreams. We were allowed to write only one letter home every two weeks, not exceeding four pages. Sometimes they were so heavily censored that almost every word was blacked out. I would use all four pages writing about Grethe. My parents wanted to know about my health; I wanted a photograph of Grethe. My sister would say that Grethe sent her greetings. I wanted her photo. Finally, my worried family was able to obtain a photo of her: there she was, seated on the ground with five puppies. It was all I ever got.

  * * *

  The boys hungered for news of the war—hoping the British were gaining ground against Germany. But during family visits they were forbidden from discussing political events. Conversations were closely monitored by guards. The prison passed out a weekly newspaper entitled “Near and Far Away” that presented an upbeat Nazi version of the war, along with cheerful family stories and a page on sports. The boys read it over and over. Parents tried to report news, but little got past the guards who monitored their conversations.

  Prison drawing by Knud Pedersen of a romantic walk with Grethe in dreams

  Still, information leaked in. One evening at bedtime, guards ordered the boys to take off their shoes and hand them out the door. What was this? It made no sense at all. The whispered explanation came during a family visit: Knud Hornbo and the Houlberg brothers had remained in Aalborg where they had shared the cell with the dummy escape bar that Alf and Jens had fashioned. At night they had gone out for sabotage and had returned in the morning. But they had just been captured during one of their escapes via the dummy window bar. Now the shoes made sense: the warden didn’t want the same thing to happen at Nyborg. Take their shoes, he had ordered his guards. Let’s not give these boys any ideas.

  * * *

  Vi Vil Vinde (We Will Win)

  In 1943, the Churchill Club’s impact grew steadily outside the prison walls. The British Royal Air Force air-dropped leaflets telling the club’s story all over Denmark in January and again in July. The second flyer concluded, “The schoolboys of Aalborg should be allowed to compare their actions with some of the best that take place in other occupied countries.” In April the American radio series The March of Time dramatized the Aalborg boys’ sabotage. In the radio play the tearful Danish judge ends his sentencing speech with “Be brave, boys! You will never serve your whole sentence, for brighter times will soon come to Denmark and to the whole world. Be patient, you won’t have to wait long.”

  Propaganda produced by the RAF to encourage Danish resistance fighters

  * * *

  Despite the censorship, news of the war seeped into the prison and traveled from cellmate to cellmate. Inmates heard of a major allied victory at El Alamein, in North Africa, and more progress at Stalingrad in Russia. Sometimes information came from unexpected sources.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: One day in the library I met a prisoner who had been arrested a few months after us. He knew who we were and had heard that we were in Nyborg. He came pushing a book cart to each cell once every two weeks, offering books to read. A guard followed right behind him. The first time he came to me he looked into my eyes and told me to select a specific book and turn to a specific page. On that page I found a code. By spelling with combinations of underlined words and letters I was informed about the British bombing of the shipyard Burmeister and Wain in Copenhagen. This was in 1943, and we never met again after the war. He was very brave and clever to inform me as he did.

  * * *

  The Churchill Club remained a potent symbol of resistance in Denmark even as its members languished behind bars. One day they were told to put on their civilian clothes and assemble in the main room. Waiting there was a formally dressed man with a familiar mild face and a head of curly hair. It was the Danish secretary of justice, Thune Jacobsen. He said he wanted to talk to them, to see how they were doing. “His tone was apologetic,” Eigil recalled. “He asked us to be patient, to understand that his work was the best he could do for the benefit of a
ll Danes. He was not a Nazi beetle, he said. The more he talked, the more he made a fool of himself. For us, he was one of the ones who aided the Germans.”

  * * *

  The Telegram Crisis

  Late in 1942, Adolf Hitler sent Denmark’s king, Christian X, a warm, personal telegram congratulating the king on his seventy-second birthday. The king replied with a mere, “My utmost thanks, [signed] Christian Rex.” Hitler took it as a personal slight. Enraged, the führer immediately recalled his ambassador from Copenhagen and expelled the Danish ambassador from Germany. Hitler moved Werner Best, a dedicated Nazi and Gestapo member, to Copenhagen as the high commander of Denmark.

  Adolf Hitler

  * * *

  KNUD PEDERSEN: Thune was the worst kind of Nazi collaborator. He said our work had been useless because the British did not want Danes committing acts of sabotage against the Germans. But we knew it was a lie. The British had already organized a Danish sabotage force, and we knew it. He told us we should be grateful that we had good homes to return to, unlike most prisoners in the building. He made me sick. My letter to my parents the week after his visit was so full of spite for him that the guards returned it to me three times to rewrite it. Finally, I didn’t send it at all.

  One night a new batch of prisoners arrived at Nyborg. Word went from one cell window to the next. They were schoolboys from Aalborg. Their group was called Denmark’s Freedom League. They had been inspired by us. Like us, they had been caught by the Danish police. They said there were many others out there, and resistance was growing. That was the best news we got, the best sign of all.

  One of Knud’s censored prison letters to his family with a significant portion crossed out

  * * *

  A prisoner’s sentence at Nyborg was divided into three stages. Stage 1 prisoners, the newest, had almost no privileges. Books borrowed from the prison library had to have a religious theme. Family members could write only one letter every fourteen days.

  In stage 2 things relaxed a bit—inmates could go to a room to play table tennis or chess between 8 and 9 p.m. Or they could use this “happy hour,” as it was called, to talk among themselves.

  Stage 2 inmates could take out any book in the library. Knud Pedersen used this opportunity to catch up on classic works of literature by writers such as Goethe, Schiller, and Homer. Stage 2 prisoners also got a small garden plot that they could use as they wished. Eigil turned his into a park with castles. Jens grew a vegetable garden. Uffe made a lovely stone garden. Knud let his grow wild.

  Stage 2 and stage 3 prisoners also got to have some hobby materials in the cell. Uffe at last got material to carve wooden airplanes. Knud got an artist’s sketchbook. He intended on drawing set designs for theater plays, until he noticed a warning printed on the front page.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: A message in bold letters read, “You are not allowed to make drawings of naked women.” I filled the entire sketchbook with naked girls and when I got my porridge the next morning I used it as glue and plastered all the walls in my cells with the drawings. This was my first art exhibition. There went all my hobby materials for the next two months. I was a terrible prisoner.

  * * *

  One day late in 1942, a tall, slim, long-legged man wearing glasses had introduced himself to the boys as Hugo Worsaae Petersen. They could call him Mr. Worsaae. He had been sent by the prison to be their teacher since they were still of school age. They would work in a large room designated as the schoolroom. The first task would be to complete their middle school exam. Their old textbooks were en route from Aalborg, and they would study for an hour after breakfast each day, sometimes working in groups of three or four. They would study Danish, history, German, arithmetic, and geometry. They would take their written exams in their cells. Oral exams would be in the schoolroom.

  After months of harshness, Mr. Worsaae was a breath of fresh air. He spoke to them as human beings. He arranged prison visits by well-known poets and convinced prison authorities to return the boys’ watches, glasses, and family photos. He even got some of the guards to call them by their names rather than their numbers.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: Mr. Worsaae encouraged my interest in art. He gave me many more art magazines than the regulations allowed. He read Henrik Ibsen dramas to us on Sunday afternoons. He was a wonderful actor.

  He was especially kind to us at Christmastime, which meant a lot. It was the first Christmas any of us had been away from home. Memories of family and friends flooded back. I wanted to cry, but I had forgotten how. I finally discovered that by softly singing Christmas songs in my cell at night I could make the tears flow down my cheeks. I sang every song I knew and wept the whole next day.

  Mr. Worsaae made sure we were treated specially on Christmas Eve, which is when we celebrated the holiday. We were summoned into the schoolroom and served a delicious pork steak and dessert. I decorated the room with a sculpture of a snow-covered hill. I drew a snow landscape on the chalkboard, too.

  We gobbled so much heavy food that night that they had to feed us fried herring on Christmas day to absorb the fat. The whole day was wonderful. The day after that, while we were cleaning up, the chubby guard who was my nemesis watched me silently as I pushed my snow sculpture over to a far corner. Finally he called across the room, “Take good care of that thing, 28.… You’re going to have to bring it back next Christmas.” It was a cruel reminder that I still had more than a year to go at Nyborg. He didn’t have to say that. The guards were robots.

  Soon after the New Year, Mr. Worsaae saddened us boys by announcing he would be leaving Nyborg for a different assignment.

  * * *

  In April 1943, Helge Milo and Mogens Thomson, the boys who had drawn the briefest sentences, were released from prison and taken home by their families. That left five.

  Four months later, in late August 1943, inmates rushed to their windows when they heard the roar of airplanes. Eigil wrote, “I watched a large group of Allied bombers fly past! It was glorious. Now the Germans will finally get what they deserve, I thought. Three or four hours later they flew back, but not so many of them.”

  * * *

  August 29, 1943

  The sounds the Churchill Clubbers heard outside their cells on August 29, 1943, reflected an upheaval in Danish society. Throughout the spring of 1943, Germany had become increasingly frustrated with strikes by Danish workers for higher wages. When Germans cracked down with brutal countermeasures, Danes in thirty-three towns stopped working. Germans issued orders prohibiting public meetings and gatherings after dark. Danes refused to cooperate. On August 29, Germany, exasperated, took over the government of Denmark, stationing troops at railroad stations, power plants, factories, and other key places, including, as the boys discovered, Nyborg State Prison.

  * * *

  One day, German soldiers with rifles surged into the prison. In their cells the boys could hear the clomp of heavy boots but could not see what was going on. Rumors flew from window to window along the Division K wing: Soldiers had come to fetch them to Germany. No, they were rounding up Danish citizens who kept weapons in their homes. That actually made sense—it had long been rumored that Germans stored confiscated weapons in the Nyborg prison’s giant loft.

  After hours of anxious waiting, a guard came to Division K to inform them that the Danish rulers had defied orders and Germany had taken over the government. Danish authorities had refused to accept German occupation any longer. The protectorate was over. What the boys had heard from their cell windows were the sounds of Germans attacking the Danes at Nyborg Strand and Allied planes responding.

  “That’s how I experienced August 29, 1943,” Eigil wrote. “At last our country stood up and we behaved as Norwegians did.” But what would it mean to the boys in the Nyborg prison? Would they now be sent by brutal Nazi masters to German prisons? Or would their prison now be run by the Gestapo? As it turned out, the day’s events changed Nyborg State Prison very little.

  Danish citizens in Aalborg, August 1
943, in open conflict with German occupiers

  KNUD PEDERSEN: The turning point for Denmark may have been August 29, 1943, but not much at all changed for us. The main difference I saw was that the Danish guard outside my cell window—the one who paced back and forth counting bricks in the wall—was replaced by a German with a helmet, a rifle, and a battle uniform. Soon he was counting bricks just like the Dane.

  * * *

  Three weeks later, on September 18, 1943, Mogens Fjellerup—the Professor—and Eigil Astrup-Frederiksen were released. Months later, Uffe Darket, too, said his goodbyes and the Churchill Club at Nyborg was down to the Pedersen brothers. They were transferred to a different unit, nearer the adult prisoners.

  * * *

  The Rescue of Danish Jews

  On September 28, 1943, a German diplomat secretly informed Danish resistance leaders of Nazi plans to deport the Danish Jews to German concentration camps for mass execution. Danes quickly organized a nationwide effort to smuggle Jews by sea to neutral Sweden. Tipped off to the German plans, most of Denmark’s Jews left Danish cities by train, by car, or on foot. Non-Jewish Danes hid them in homes, hospitals, and churches until they could be moved to Sweden. Within a two-week period, fishermen helped ferry some 7,200 Danish Jews and 680 of their non-Jewish family members to safety in Sweden.

  The only Churchill Club member directly affected was Eigil. His mother was Jewish, and the family was deeply concerned. A mere ten days after Eigil was released from Nyborg, he remembered, “Our parish priest advised us to go underground … We left home and stayed with friends. Fortunately, the Germans didn’t catch us, so after some days we moved back home again.”