The Boys Who Challenged Hitler Page 11

  A reenactment of the October 1943 boatlift of Danish Jews to Sweden, from a Swedish film produced in 1945

  * * *

  In America, an exaggerated version of the Churchill Club’s story appeared in the September 1943 issue of True Comics under the title “The Boy Saboteurs” (see here)

  16

  First Hours of Freedom

  On May 27, 1944, Knud and Jens Pedersen were released from Nyborg State Prison. On one of the very last days before he was released, Jens took his written student examination for university admission from his cell. Guards explained to adult inmates that number 30 was attempting something extremely difficult, something that required great concentration. As a gesture of respect, the whole section of the prison remained silent during the morning hours as Jens worked. Even the guards refrained from jingling their keys.

  He got the highest possible score. A Nazi-controlled newspaper complained in print that Jens Pedersen should not have had the opportunity to take the test. His chance, said the writer, proved that it was now possible for a saboteur to be a judge in Denmark.

  Knud and Jens had each served two years and a month. Though they were no longer prisoners 28 and 30, there were huge adjustments ahead for both of them.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: It is difficult to imagine or to describe how long the last days of prison were. The minutes crawled by. Each hour took twice as long as the one before. Finally, the moment came when our names were called, the doors to our cells were pulled open, and we were escorted to the gate where our parents stood to receive us. I think they were shocked by our appearance. My street clothing hung like drapery over my thin frame. My hair was barely long enough to put a comb through. Mother could not hold the tears back.

  We walked through the city of Nyborg to the railway station and caught a train to Odense. There, Knud Hedelund—“Little Knud”—our partner in the RAF Club way back at the beginning of our resistance, was waiting with his parents to greet us warmly. They drove us by car—a rare treat in wartime—to a tremendous party in our honor. There were Danish flags on the table and roast duckling on the plates. Best of all were ripe home-grown garden tomatoes, specimens so rich and abundant that Jens and I—after two years of bread and porridge—spent much of our first free night rushing back and forth to a toilet.

  After toasts in our honor we stepped outside and took a walk in the moonlight with Little Knud. At last here was our chance to find out what had happened to our brothers in the RAF Club. Where was our cousin Hans Jøergen? And Harald Holm? Had they continued to attack the German war machine? Was everyone still alive? Were they free or had they been captured?

  It had been nearly two years since we had heard from the RAF Club. My cousin Hans Jøergen, who like me was eighteen years of age now, had written to us all the way through our jail stint in Aalborg, exchanging coded war bulletins with Jens. But then we lost contact with him at Nyborg. For some reason he quit writing altogether. His final message had said simply, “We continue.”

  The three of us walked back among the Hedelund family’s tomato greenhouses, and Little Knud unloaded what he knew.

  The RAF Club had expanded while we were in prison, taking on more classmates from the Odense school. They made many strikes, the most powerful of which happened in Naesby, on the outskirts of Odense. There, the Germans had taken over an auto plant and retooled it to make mobile homes for their soldiers on the eastern front. The factory was an obvious target for the RAF Club. They chose the night of the Hans Christian Andersen Nightingale Festival to attack, on an evening when Odense’s entire populace was absorbed in celebrating Denmark’s most famous author.

  Several RAF Club boys, one of them Hans Jøergen, entered the factory from the rooftop and discovered inside a treasure of combustible materials—paint thinner, paint itself, and best of all gas bottles! What a gift they could make for the Third Reich! They piled up some rags, soaked them with gas, and climbed a ladder they had placed inside back up onto the roof.

  From the roof, they tossed a match or a lighted rag; then they dropped to the ground and took off running. In a matter of moments, a mighty explosion shook the building.

  The other party guests were calling for us to go back inside, but this was too important. We would have to travel to Aalborg the next day, and here was our only chance to find out. We ignored the calls and stayed outside to hear more.

  * * *

  Knud Hedelund told the Pedersens that when members of the RAF Club turned eighteen, some wanted to go to England and enlist with British forces. But it wasn’t easy. They would have to flee Denmark to Sweden, and then make an underground arrangement to continue to Britain.

  Though they didn’t know it, their fate had already been sealed. One of the RAF Club’s younger members, naively believing that Danish authorities would help them escape to Sweden, had sent an anonymous letter to Danish police that read: “Orla Mortensen [the name of one of the RAF members] is involved in major sabotage.” And he gave Orla’s full name and address.

  Within hours Orla was in custody and others were on the run. One RAF Club member leaped out a window when police rang his doorbell. The boy who’d written the letter was tracked down on his bicycle. Hans Jøergen was overtaken by a Danish policeman after a foot chase across a field.

  They were immediately convicted by a German court martial. A month later the RAF Club boys sat in prison glumly awaiting their fate and shooting suspicious glances at each other—who had been the rat? Soon these RAF Club members, including Hans Jøergen, were transported to the German-run Western Prison in Copenhagen, in a special wing reserved for political prisoners, those convicted of having committed acts of resistance.

  As they started back toward the party, Knud Hedelund confessed that he was deeply worried about Hans Jøergen and the others. It was well-known that at Western Prison serious resisters were shipped to a special place—later called the Memory Park—where they were roped to trees and shot to death. With that in mind, they stepped back inside.

  A drawing by Hans Jøergen Andersen of his cell in Odense

  KNUD PEDERSEN: We sat back down at the table to listen to more speeches and accept more tributes to our courage. But Little Knud’s report had pulled us back into a reality that, closeted as prisoners, we had not faced in a long time. We were still occupied by an enemy, and we were still at war.

  After the final speech and the last toast, I was shown by my hosts to my bedroom. I closed the door and lay down on my bed, head pounding.

  For the first time in years I was lying in a room whose windows had no bars. It was like a new life. Perhaps the adults who kindly gathered around us that evening to celebrate our release from prison wanted to give us the impression that there was peace in the world, so that for a short while at least, we could taste freedom. But in the minutes before I fell asleep I could only think about my brothers. Where was Hans Jøergen tonight? Where was Alf? Were they alive? I fell asleep freshly reminded that we were still on the road to an uncertain future and that there was still so much work to do.

  At secret locations, British planes dropped weapons containers for Danish partisans

  17

  Better on the Inside

  The next afternoon Knud and Jens Pedersen hopped down from the Odense passenger car, took the family luggage off the train, and helped their parents step onto the pavement. As the train pulled away the quartet began to walk through the cavernous station, finally pushing through the arched doorway and out into the sunlit streets of Aalborg.

  It was May 1944. Familiar streets told of a Denmark that had changed radically while the brothers were behind bars. Shop owners who had sold goods to German soldiers in the old days now stared through the windows of empty stores. Others stood out front and swept the sidewalks, looking left and right for a German customer. They were stigmatized as traitors now.

  Exactly two years earlier, when the Churchill Club members had been arrested, the boys were among the very few who had stood up to the German oppressors. The
y had been caught, but not before they had set the ball in motion. Now a resistance was in full swing.

  There were eight times as many acts of sabotage in 1943 as there had been in 1942. By 1944, so many acts of violence had been committed against German property that Germany had declared Denmark “enemy territory.”

  Aalborg had become a hotbed of resistance. Residential gardens bulged with buried guns, smuggled from abroad, tooled at home, or stolen from the Germans. Underground newspapers, at last telling the truth about the war, flew from small, mobile, concealed presses. Massive labor strikes challenged German authority.

  Night after night British planes parachuted tubes of weapons at prearranged spots throughout Denmark. Back in 1942, when the Churchill Club members were captured and jailed, shocking the nation, Germany had seemed invincible. Now, two years later, with Norwegian conditions achieved at last, Goliath was teetering.

  The Pedersens walked on to the monastery. They dropped their bags and banged on the front door. A voice rang out, received an answer, and the door opened a crack. Then it flew all the way open and there were open arms and broad smiles of welcome for Knud and Jens.

  The boys soon discovered that no place in Aalborg had changed more than their own home. Never a restful place, the monastery had become a full-blown resistance cell. Couriers were constantly depositing or picking up coded messages. Saboteurs hid inside the monastery, using it as a safe house.

  Edvard Pedersen proudly conducted his sons through the new emergency escape route, out through the back door, up the stairs to the loft—where a fully loaded rifle rested at the ready—and on to the coil of rope at the rear of the chapel building that could be used to drop down onto a back street.

  Knud soon realized his family had changed, too.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: My mother had become the master of the house. It was she who opened the door when the knock sounded and you didn’t know who was on the other side. Father allowed the monastery to become a safe house for resisters, but every week he put us all in danger. He damned the bloody Germans in his Sunday sermons, almost taunting them. The Sunday after a failed attempt on Hitler’s life, Father observed from the pulpit, “Well, the devil looks after his own, doesn’t he?” His parishioners warned him to back off. They said a full church on Sunday was a perfect site for a “clearing murder,” the revenge mass execution the Germans typically carried out when a single Nazi informer was shot by the resistance.

  Father ignored them. He brandished the big Colt revolver given to him by the resistance to protect himself. He showed it off to friends who came to the monastery. Once when he was messing around it went off, sending a bullet tearing into our bookshelves. It lodged in volume three of the five-volume History of the Danish People. That bullet passed only a few centimeters from Mother’s head.

  * * *

  Action sizzled throughout Denmark. On June 6, just two weeks after Knud and Jens were released from Nyborg, resistance fighters bombed the Globus factory on the outskirts of Copenhagen, halting production of the V-2 rockets that had been hammering London.

  Days later, saboteurs from the Danish resistance group Borgerlige Partisaner (BOPA) blew up the Riffel Syndicate factory, makers of machine guns for the Germans.

  Jens had his mind fixed on college, but Knud wanted to jump back into the thick of the resistance. His parents worried. To them, Knud needed rest, not action. The family scraped up enough money to rent a summer house in a small seaside village. Long summer days and evenings with family, walks in the sunshine—that’s what the boys needed to heal, they thought.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: I was totally lost at first. I didn’t know what to do. I was as lonely as ever for a soul mate, maybe even more so because just after I got back I met Grethe again and I instantly realized I wasn’t in love anymore. She was riding down the street on her bicycle and stopped to greet me. I had spent more than two years totally obsessed with this person and now, strangely, all the feelings had vanished. Where did that leave me?

  That was what I was puzzling over when, in the seaside town of Hurup, I met a young girl vacationing alone with her father. The old man was sitting on his porch in an armchair with a glass of whiskey, singing. Next to him was his daughter, Patricia Bibby, seventeen, dark haired, and beautiful.

  We started talking. It turned out she lived in Aalborg and went to Cathedral School. They were British and had been trapped in Denmark by the German invasion. After a day or two I went back and invited her to the beach. We spent the whole day walking among the dunes and sunbathing and talking. We lay side by side, and at times there was less than an inch between our fingertips. I couldn’t work up the nerve to span that inch for fear of ruining the whole thing.

  But we talked. That is, I talked and she listened. She was the greatest listener. I could tell her anything, about prison, about my actions against the Germans, about my dreams. She laughed with a great laugh and encouraged me to hold nothing back. She made me feel like a soldier, even though I had spent much of the war behind bars, too young to enlist and with no army to enlist in anyway. I would have told her anything.

  * * *

  Patricia Bibby had wanted to meet Knud Pedersen. “Everyone at school knew who he was. I admired the stance he took, and he was very good-looking. I made a point to get to know his sister, Gertrud. I invited her to my house, and found out that the Pedersens were going to Hurup for the summer. I maneuvered my father to going there instead of where we were planning to go. It’s true that Knud and I met by chance, but I was there on purpose. I loved listening to him and being with him. I found him exciting. Alive and fun. Did I feel anything for him? Oh, yes, I did. He was tall and slender and funny, and he had an idea every two minutes. When we were lying on the beach he said, ‘I don’t know why we can’t have suitcases with four little wheels.’ Then it was ‘Why can’t we get toothpaste to pop out of a bottle?’”

  According to Patricia, Knud also talked about his resistance experiences, about his obsession with a girl while he was in prison, about taking the guns from the German soldiers and going out at night to do sabotage. “I was not mature enough at seventeen to sense that he was in trouble, that prison had left him deeply shaken. He talked about jail through amusing stories, like the one about the guard who told him to polish his latrine until it shone ‘like your mother’s best vase.’ I laughed, but I couldn’t feel his pain. Not yet.”

  Patricia Bibby at Cathedral School graduation, 1946

  KNUD PEDERSEN: After the summer holidays Pat became a daily guest in the afternoon in the monastery, visiting Gertrud. I did my best to win her heart. We visited in my room a lot. I showed her my paintings and produced a couple of romantic paintings especially for her.

  One night in the winter between 1944 and ’45, Patricia’s father died, leaving her alone in the world. My mother immediately invited her to move into the monastery, which she did.

  Living with us changed the whole chemistry. Now she became a sort of half-sister to me, though I was still in love with her. Jens came home from university in Copenhagen, and of course he fell instantly in love with Pat. That was a given: anything I wanted, Jens would try to get. One night Pat came and showed me a gift she had gotten from Jens—a ring inset with a big green stone. I was unable to speak. My only hope was that she was not in love with him, but I was not going to ask. That would break our code: the way we were, if she had something to tell me, Pat would do so.

  * * *

  One winter night about ten o’clock, the family heard a banging at the monastery’s front door. Mrs. Pedersen nervously cracked it open upon a snow-covered young man on skis. He was panting hard, sending plumes of vapor into the cold air. He introduced himself as Karl August Algreen Moeller, a polytechnical student from Copenhagen University. He had just skied thirty-five miles from the village of Randers, pursued by the Gestapo. He had been given the monastery’s address as a safe house. Please, he asked. Could they shelter him?

  He was heartily welcomed and installed in an extra bed in Knud
’s room.

  * * *

  The SOE

  The Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British covert group, worked with all European resistance movements. Danish resistance activists received British training to carry out sabotage acts. The SOE was extremely disciplined, with a very firm command structure. The British insisted on control. British Royal Air Force planes dropped thousands of containers of weapons onto Danish soil in 1944 and 1945. Danes who were caught collecting weapons were shot on the spot or sent to German concentration camps. When the Churchill Club members were arrested in 1942, many Danish police were trusted German collaborators. But by the time the Pedersens were released in 1944, many Danish police refused German orders and were helping the resistance. It was another sign of how greatly things had changed while the boys were locked up.

  A container with weapons dropped by the British SOE over Denmark to support the resistance, 1945

  * * *

  KNUD PEDERSEN: Karl was the resistance saboteur I longed to be. His work began each evening in my father’s office when the news service from BBC to Denmark came on the radio. Karl telegraphed radio messages to the British group Special Operations Executive (SOE) every day from different addresses in Aalborg—though, curiously, never from the monastery. The British commanders sent coded messages through the radio broadcasts, like “Your grandmother wants a cup of tea” or “There is no more air in the front wheel on your bike.” Each message signaled the movement of resistance forces. “Your grandmother wants a cup of tea” could mean “Be at a certain farmer’s field at 9:00 p.m., when RAF airplanes will drop weapons containers.”

  Karl August Algreen Moeller