changemakers

As you can prob­a­bly tell by my books Be a Change­mak­er and Emmanuel’s Dream, I love writ­ing about heroes and change­mak­ers. It should be no sur­prise, then, that I love read­ing about them, too. My favorite kinds of sto­ries are those about ordi­nary peo­ple who act­ed with extra­or­di­nary strength, con­vic­tion, and courage, and the book I just fin­ished read­ing is full of peo­ple doing just that. In Courage & Defi­ance: Sto­ries of Spies, Sabo­teurs and Sur­vivors in World War II Den­mark by Deb­o­rah Hop­kin­son (Scholas­tic Press, August 2015), the author has clear­ly done a great deal of care­ful research to bring us nar­ra­tive non­fic­tion about the WWII resis­tance move­ment in Den­mark from the per­spec­tive of some of those who took part in it. It’s a grip­ping tale of adven­ture and sus­pense, and one that has rarely been told.

Deb­o­rah has been inter­viewed on this blog before, and I’m super excit­ed to wel­come her back once again as part of the Courage and Defi­ance blog tour. I hope you enjoy the interview!
LAT: I know I thor­ough­ly enjoyed this book, Deb­o­rah. What kind of young read­er do you think Courage & Defi­ance will appeal to? What oth­er books might be read-alikes? 
DH: I vis­it schools all over the coun­try and love to ask stu­dents what they’re read­ing. While fan­ta­sy and sci­ence fic­tion are always pop­u­lar, I’m usu­al­ly sur­prised by the num­ber of stu­dents – girls and boys – who tell me they like to read about his­to­ry and like non­fic­tion. There are def­i­nite­ly kids who read every­thing they can get their hands on top­ics such as the Titan­ic and World War II, but I think read­ers who enjoyed Num­ber the Stars by Lois Lowry or The Diary of Anne Frank will also enjoy Courage & Defi­ance.
LAT: This is a sto­ry that many of us prob­a­bly haven’t heard before. Why do you think that might be?
DH: I think per­haps that here in the U.S., we’re most nat­u­ral­ly inter­est­ed in sto­ries that take place after Amer­i­ca entered World War II on Decem­ber 7, 1941. (As it hap­pens, my next non­fic­tion book about sub­marines in the Pacif­ic war begins with the attack on Pearl Har­bor and will be out in 2016 for the 75th anniver­sary.) While I did find a num­ber of adult non­fic­tion books about the expe­ri­ence of Danes dur­ing the Ger­man occu­pa­tion, which began on April 9, 1940, almost all were schol­ar­ly titles or of inter­est pri­mar­i­ly to his­to­ri­ans (includ­ing a 600-page book about the SOE in Den­mark). I feel for­tu­nate that I was able to find as much as I did in Eng­lish, but I am sure there is much more avail­able in Dan­ish. We were able to access the pho­to archives of the Muse­um of Dan­ish Resistance.

LAT: Dur­ing the research phase of Courage & Defi­ance, what dis­cov­er­ies did you come across that made you feel like you’d struck gold? Was there any­thing in the research that came as a surprise?
DH: At author vis­its, I tell stu­dents that my favorite part of writ­ing is the research. And since I knew lit­tle when I began sev­er­al years ago, I felt like I was dis­cov­er­ing some­thing new and incred­i­ble at every cor­ner. Prob­a­bly the most sig­nif­i­cant dis­cov­ery I made was find­ing a mem­oir in Eng­lish enti­tled A Let­ter to My Descen­dents by Niels Skov. Niels, whom I lat­er had the priv­i­lege to meet, came to the U.S. after the war, where he received a Ph.D. and became a col­lege pro­fes­sor. His per­son­al account was so incred­i­bly live­ly and vibrant – which matched his per­son­al­i­ty, even at age nine­ty-four. To my sur­prise, he had been deport­ed to a Ger­man labor camp at the same time as anoth­er activist whose sto­ry I tell, but they did not meet. It made me real­ize just how many incred­i­ble sto­ries there are in his­to­ry, and how eas­i­ly they are lost.
LAT: This one may be tricky, but if you can fath­om a guess… What do you think it was about the Danes that made them able to resist the Ger­mans and sup­port their Jew­ish coun­try­men so effectively? 
DH: Well, I am not sure I am qual­i­fied to say, but what comes across in all the first-per­son accounts I found was that ordi­nary peo­ple shared an unwa­ver­ing sense of human decen­cy, a love of coun­try, and a com­mit­ment to doing the right thing – even at great cost. It seems to me that as the war went on, the con­fi­dence and belief that peo­ple had in demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues helped to give them the courage to take risks.
LAT: In the book, you asked Niels what his advice to young peo­ple today would be. Now that you’ve done all this research and writ­ten such a fan­tas­tic book, what is YOUR advice to young peo­ple today?
DH: While young peo­ple in Amer­i­ca now may not be faced with life-and-death deci­sions as Dan­ish cit­i­zens were in the 1940s, we all grap­ple with dif­fi­cult per­son­al choic­es. So per­haps I’d sim­ply give the same advice I’ve often told my own two chil­dren: make good choic­es and do good work in the world. And, of course, I have to add: keep reading!
LAT: That’s great advice, Deb­o­rah. Thanks so much for vis­it­ing today! 
For oth­er stops on the Courage and Defi­ance blog tour please check deborahhopkinson.com.