Camp 30

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Preteen readers who enjoyed Eric Walters’s Camp X (2002) will be
delighted to learn that the Braun brothers (Jack, 14, and George, 12)
are engaged in more exciting wartime adventures. Commencing on August
17, 1942, the action resumes almost at the point Camp X concluded, but
readers need not have read the earlier work in order to appreciate Camp
30.

An intercepted Nazi message suggests that the boys and their mother
could be in danger because of the boys’ previous involvement with Camp
X. So Mrs. Braun, who remains unaware of her sons’ earlier adventures,
is offered a better-paying job in Bowmanville, 20 miles away. She is to
work for Colonel Armstrong, the commander of Camp 30, a prisoner-of-war
camp for high-ranking German officers. Circumstances lead Jack and
George to having daily access to the POW camp, where they are befriended
by Otto Kretschmer, a U-boat captain. Unbeknownst to them, Kretschmer is
masterminding a mass escape through a tunnel. The boys, encouraged by
suspicious Camp X personnel, snoop about, and their seemingly insatiable
curiosity causes them not only to stumble on the escape but once again
to be taken prisoner. All, however, ends well, and the novel’s closing
lines suggest that readers may not have seen the last of the brothers.

A fast-paced read, Camp 30 would have benefited from a historical note
that, in broad terms, clarified the plot’s factual and fictional
elements. Highly recommended.