The Boy Who Dared

"It's morning. Soft gray light slips over the tall redbrick wall. It stretches across the exercise yard and reaches through the high, barred windows. In a cell on the ground floor, the light shifts dark shapes into a small stool, and scrawny table, and a bed made of wooden boards with no mattress or blanket. On that bed, a thin, huddled figure, Helmuth, a boy of seventeen, lies awake. Shivering. Trembling. It's a Tuesday. The executioner works on Tuesday." - summary from The Boy Who Dared.

The Boy Who Dared is written by Susan Campbell Bartoletti. It's a novel based on the life of Helmuth Guddat Hübener. The story follows Helmuth's life in Hamburg, Germany, from a boy of three to when he dies at the age of seventeen.

Helmuth goes through life admiring Hitler for what he is doing for Germany but realizes that Hitler isn't the wonderful leader he is made out to be in by newspapers or Helmuth's mother's boyfriend who is a Rottenführer, an non-commissioned corporal. He sees through the lies and the half-truths the media is feeding the rest of Germany. So he stands up against it and is put to death for listening to a foreign radio station and distributing the news heard in connection with conspiracy to commit high treason and treasonable support of the enemy.

The short book, which is just over 200 pages, shows the trials of a young boy in the middle of Hilter's reign in Germany. It's a book with powerful meaning that says stand up for what you believe no matter what the consequences.