A portion of the Churchill Club’s weapons cache, including the six mortar grenades
KNUD PEDERSEN: During the entire first week of May 1942, our nerves were stretched taut. We were elated that we had pulled off the rail yard action, but anxiety mounted as Eigil’s sister warned us that the special security police had identified Cathedral School as the hub of sabotage activity in Aalborg. Now we glanced around anxiously wherever we went. We felt, or imagined, eyes upon us everywhere. We heard footsteps. We lived in an atmosphere of fear.
All the tension boiled over one afternoon in Jens’s study. Eigil demanded through tears that we cease sabotage activity altogether. He accused us all of risking the lives of his family, since his mother was Jewish. Hitler would stop at nothing to erase the Jewish population. We would feel the same way, he insisted, if we were in his shoes. Jens was moved to support him. Børge and I would hear none of it. We were single-minded. Nothing has changed, we said. Danes are still lapdogs. Germans are still swine. Norwegians still resist. So, therefore, will we. We will never turn back. Enough of this: let us return our attention to the Nazi roadsters lined outside the post office on Budolfi Square.
While bright birds sang cheerfully and flowers burst into bloom outside our windows, we stayed inside and tore ourselves apart that afternoon. The club was deeply and bitterly divided. Jens and I nearly came to blows and had to be held apart. Finally, I stormed out with Børge beside me, slamming the door behind us. Jens and the others stayed behind.
* * *
About five o’clock on the afternoon of May 6, waitress Elsa Ottesen at Café Holle in downtown Aalborg saw two teenage boys enter the restaurant, walking briskly. Heads down, they made a beeline for the coat closet and emerged from it a very short time later. They strode straight out of the restaurant without ordering a thing. Looking through the café’s picture window, Mrs. Ottesen saw them talking on the street.
A few minutes later a German officer dining at the café discovered that his gun was missing. He had placed his belt and holster—with the pistol inside—on a shelf in the café’s coat closet. After his meal, he went to recover his sidearm and found that the holster was empty. He angrily reported this misfortune to the full restaurant staff, which sparked Mrs. Ottesen’s memory of the two boys who entered the coat closet.
Mrs. Ottesen gave a detailed statement to police. Yes, she’d seen these boys before. They had been in the restaurant a few times, always preoccupied with the coat closet, never ordering. Several times she’d seen them clustered around their bicycles out in front of the café, talking. At least twice she’d seen them peering through their framed fingers into the café window. One of them—very tall—combed his thick hair with a dramatic upsweep. She thought she could recognize him if she saw him again.
KNUD PEDERSEN: School let out at three on Friday, May 8. Another week down, just a few days left till summer break. I was walking out through the school gate with Helge, jabbering about something when I caught sight of a sharply dressed gentleman across the street with a lady at his side. Both seemed to be staring straight at us. I had never seen them before, but their eyes never left us. To create a distraction while I got a better look at them, I pulled my long black comb from my pocket and swept it up through my hair. It was the kiss of death. “It’s him,” Mrs. Elsa Ottesen no doubt said to her companion. “The tall one.”
I said to Helge, “See that guy in a suit we just passed? He’s following us. Don’t look back. Let’s stop for a minute.” We stopped. They stopped, too, the man staring intently through a grocery store window as though turnips were all that mattered in the world. We sprinted around a corner and stopped again. Moments later, the man came skidding around the same corner and nearly crashed into us. “Security Police!” the man barked. “May I see your identification cards?” It was an order, not a request.
Hours later, the front doorbell rang at the monastery. When our maid opened it a crack, police shouldered through and bulled straight into Jens’s room, shouting that he was under arrest. Jens had a fully loaded pistol in his desk drawer but wisely kept his hands away from it.
“Where are the weapons?” the officers demanded. Jens stood up and led them straight to the cellar to our secret weapons cache.
By midnight they had us all. Eleven were arrested, six from Cathedral School, plus Børge and Uffe from other schools. Børge was soon separated from us because, at fourteen, he was too young to be imprisoned under Danish law. They also nabbed Alf and Kaj Houlberg and Knud Hornbo, the three older factory workers from Brønderslev who had given us the mortar grenades. Police separated us and interviewed us one at a time at the Aalborg police station. Soon every room was chattering with the sound of Remington typewriters taking down the testimony of boys lying through their teeth. The police got ever angrier as they tore paper from the rolls, wadded it up, and threatened the suspects with harsher punishment if they continued to lie.
Two cops—the two detectives from Copenhagen—led me into an office, pointed to a chair, and shut the door. The subject on their mind was grenades. Where did we get them?
“Well,” I said, “I met a fellow during intermission at the movies. He happened to mention that he had some grenades, and I asked if we could use them.”
“What was his name?”
“He didn’t mention his name.”
One of them came across the room, took me up by my shoulders and slammed me into a wall. “Your father is a priest!” he shouted, his beet-red face no more than two inches from mine. “He tells you it is a sin to lie! And you are lying to me! Now, you tell me, boy … what is the name of the person who gave you the grenades?”
I insisted I didn’t know.
“Well, then, what did he look like?”
I told them—brown curly hair and brown eyes. And that’s all I gave them about Alf, one tiny little fact. When we were finished I was feeling pretty good about myself—I had held my tongue under fierce questioning. Of course the investigators went to the next captive and asked, “What is the name of the guy with the brown curly hair who gave you grenades?”
“Alf,” said someone.
And so on. Soon, working one boy against another, interviewing them alone, they had Alf and Kaj’s last name, and Knud Hornbo’s as well. We were interviewed so professionally that we gave them information even as we thought we were cleverly concealing it. Also, our stories kept crossing and it was impossible to keep lying.
* * *
The boys’ parents began to arrive in the early evening. Some had been home when police burst in and hauled their boys brusquely away. Others were just now finding out and racing, panic-stricken and confused, to the station. They were received by the police commissioner, an elderly white-haired man named C. L. Bach. Tears of sympathy filled his eyes as he escorted each set of parents to his office and did his best to explain.
KNUD PEDERSEN: Our parents were mute, speechless, shocked. None of them knew a thing about the Churchill Club and our activities. Their eyes widened as the commissioner told them what their supposedly bridge-playing sons had really been doing over the past six months. And the parents did not know each other, which only added to the strangeness of the atmosphere. Some of them—factory owners, doctors, lawyers, the most prominent figures of the city—had never been in a police station before.
My parents bustled into the station formally dressed from a wedding, Mother with her pearls and Father in his tuxedo. They had been summoned to a phone at the wedding and, when informed that their sons had been arrested, had made it to the police station within five minutes. Though Jens and I were proud of what we had done—standing up for our country—it was hard to look our parents in the eyes that night. Some parents repeated again and again, “How could you?” But not ours. They cared first and foremost that we were safe and that we had not been treated roughly in the arrest. Jens and I didn’t expect that our parents would reprove or punish us for what we had done. They were activists, public people, community leaders who viewed this family misfortune as just one more example of the unhappiness that war brings. As the saying goes, “In peacetime, the children bury their parents. In wartime, the parents bury their children.” Surely they were proud of us.
Police questioned us all through the night. It was amazing how much information the offer of a single cigarette could produce at midnight when you had been smokeless all day long. At two in the morning, the police were finally satisfied. There were some actions that we managed to keep hidden, but they got most of it out of us. Each boy had to sign a written statement. Still cocky, though we could barely hold our heads up, some of us signed with artistic flourishes that swept up over our names.
Finally just before dawn we were herded into a police van with armed guards and transported to the King Hans Gades Jail—Aalborg’s city jail—where we turned in our belongings and were locked into cells. We were given prison gowns and told to place our clothes on a chair outside the cell. My cellmate was Jens. As soon as the guard went away we went to the window and tried the bars. Thick, square, and solidly rooted they were. I lay down on a mattress and my eyes soon closed. It would be a long time before I slept as a free man again.