Introduction

When grave family misfortune leaves thirteen-year-old Terry Sayre without parents or relatives to care for him in the summer of 1939, his only option to elude foster care by strangers is to accept asylum abroad with his mother’s Danish kin, people he met only briefly as a child. Despondent but not given to self-pity, Terry begins life anew sheltered in his formidable grandparents’ home in a coastal town an hour’s drive from Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital. But within months of his arrival, Nazi Germany’s massive armed forces overwhelm – without provocation – their peace-loving little neighbor as the Second World War unfolds. Serving as the prism through which the five-year German occupation of Denmark is witnessed, Terry’s older self simultaneously recounts his own perilous coming of age while marooned in an alien land.

Fearful of openly resisting or even covertly harassing its conquerors at risk of instant lethal reprisals, Denmark agreed – at gunpoint – to a pact with the devil: to feed and service Hitler’s murderous legions in exchange for surviving the war largely unbloodied. Their profound moral dilemma caused the Danes to suffer from self-hatred at home and contempt among Allies abroad, some viewing them as shameless collaborators bartering their country’s honor.

Hamlet’s Children by Richard Kluger is the story of a young American’s wrenching assimilation with his Danish relatives and adopted countrymen as each, in different and often cunning ways, attempts to subvert the Germans’ iron grip on their lives. Paramount on their agenda of defiance is the Danes’ collective persistence in keeping their Jewish neighbors out of the Nazis’ pathological clutches. Vibrant with unforgettable characters and fraught with tension, this elegantly crafted narrative, at once both heartbreaking and uplifting, is a testament to the human spirit in its bleakest hours.

“Meticulously researched and strikingly imagined, Hamlet’s Children possesses treasures for a wide range of readers, from history buffs to high school students (teachers take note!). Richard Kluger has created a pitch-perfect 1940s narrator in plucky young Terry Sayre — and the perfect set of eyes and ears for revealing the agonizing choices faced by the Danes during the Second World War. Harrowing and ultimately heart-warming, Hamlet”s Children will keep you turning pages far into the night.” —Barbara Quick, author of Vivaldi’s Virgins and What Disappears

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Discussion Questions

From the author:

1. Is it fair to charge the Danes with having been de facto collaborators with their Nazi captors during the first three-and-a-half years of the German occupation?

2. Does Hamlet’s Children excuse the Nazis’ barbarism by describing the humanitarian conduct of Major Holst and a few other “good Germans” without whose cooperation the rescue of the Danish Jews would have failed?

3. Were Jared Mundt’s parents justified in their attempted murder of Eva Rasmussen, the busybody Nazi sympathizer married to Riishavn’s pharmacist, whom they blamed for their son’s death on the beach during the rescue of the Danish Jews?

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