The Boy Who Dared

Book Review by Cody

I read the book The Boy Who Dared by Susan Campbell Bartoletti. It's about a young boy named Helmuth and the life he lived when the Nazis and Hitler were in power in Germany. All the Germans thought Hitler and the Nazis were great because they were so tough and their speeches were powerful and convincing. But some of the Germans thought Hitler and the Nazis were suspicious and suddenly Hitler began banning all different country's books, buying goods from Jewish businesses, forcing German citizens to sing nothing but German songs and forcing them to listen only to German radio stations. When Helmuth was young, he thought he was going to grow up to be a Nazi because many told him he would some day be a great soldier.

Once Helmuth got older, he began to realize that all the Nazis stood for was wrong and they were headed for war. As Hitler and the Nazis defeated one country after another, the countries started to team up with each other to try to defeat the Nazis. The Nazis were making progress until they got trapped on the British border line. But on German radio stations, it reported that they were OK and that everything was good. But Helmuth's family (his two brothers, his mom and his step-dad) had an illegal radio and Helmth's brother told him to put it away and never get it out again for fear of getting caught by the Gestapo. But Helmuth took the radio out and listened, against his brother's wishes.

Helmuth listened to the BBC radio station which was illegal, and learned that the Germans had not been truthful about what they were reporting and he brought his friends over to listen to it too. They were all very nervous when they listened to it. Helmuth thought of a plan to make flyers about what was really happening during the war. His friends helped him make the flyers but Helmuth said if they got caught they could blame everything on him. He met a new friend and decided to show him the flyers. Little did he know that his so-called friend was going to turn on him and tell the Gestapo. His friends did what Helmuth told them to do from the start and blamed it all on him. All the friends went to court and since all of them blamed Helmuth, he was executed and the rest served different amounts of time in jail.