UNDERGROUND SCOUTS - Marie Sontag - One Free Book

Welcome, Marie. Tell us a bit about your newest release, Underground Scouts. Although Underground Scouts is a historical fiction book, it tells the true story of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides who come alongside the Polish Underground Army in an attempt to oust the Germans from Warsaw before the war’s end.

What spurred you to write Underground Scouts? The idea for the story struck me when my husband and I visited Warsaw in 2008. We had a sixteen-year-old Polish foreign exchange student named Staś (Stash) live with us during the 1996-1997 school year. He has continued to call us Mom and Dad as we’ve stayed in touch, and now his children call us Grandma and Grandpa. When we visited Staś in 2008, he took us to the Warsaw Rising Museum. That’s where we learned about the Polish Boy Scouts and Girl Guides’ involvement in the event the Varsovians call “The Rising.” I told my husband, “The middle-school students I teach in the U.S. need to hear how Polish youth were willing to give up their lives to maintain democracy.” I decided the best way to do that was to research the facts, place a fictional teen in the middle of the real action, and add narrative drama to make this amazing past come to life. The result was Underground Scouts.

When writing fiction based on real characters, do you change names and details to keep it strictly fictional, or do you include some real names and facts? Since I formerly taught social studies for fifteen years, I keep the details, names, and facts as real as possible. I want readers to see history through my fictional character’s eyes so they can draw their own conclusions if they spot current-day applications from what happened in the past. The fictional character gives me enough leverage to add drama, enabling the events to come to life for the reader. It helps them experience what real people felt in those situations. As I do in of most of my historical fiction books, in the back of the book I include the names of the real characters and the fictional ones to help the reader make the distinction. For Underground Scouts, I also published their pictures on my website.

It sounds like Underground Scouts brings to life a very different time and place for American readers. What message do you hope people will take away from this book? During WWII, the Polish Boy Scouts and Girl Guides risked their lives in order to preserve their democratic nation and religious freedom. My 89-year-old friend Halina was a 12 -year-old member of the Girl Guides when the Germans invaded. She was 17 when she joined the Underground Army’s Zoshka Battalion. As Halina told me, “We were not heroes. We only did what we had to do.” Would American youth today be willing to do the same for their country? My hope is that after reading this book, their answer would be yes.

How do you weave faith and hope into the story? I weave faith and hope into the story through the Scouts’ symbol of the kotwica. This Polish word kotwica means “anchor” in English. You can see it as an “Easter Egg” on the cover. The Scouts combined two Polish words that meant “Fighting Polish”—Polish words that start with a P and a W, to foist psychological warfare on the Germans. They painted this symbol on buildings around Warsaw, risking their lives by going out after curfew. The signs served to put the Germans on notice that Scouts would strike somewhere, somehow, some time, and they wouldn’t see it coming. Halina mentioned she was one of the Scouts who did this.

Two fictional adult sisters in the story code-named Auntie L and Auntie M are Christians who work with the Underground in Warsaw. A few of the fictional Scouts I insert into the drama live with these older ladies as the Scouts carry out their secret acts of resistance and sabotage. The Scouts often see the women reading Scripture together in the morning.

During the third year of the occupation, a seventeen-year-old Scout named Magdalena grows discouraged by the years of deprivation and death. She wonders where God is in all of this.
Auntie L tells her, “Evil men make evil choices, but that doesn’t change who God is. You know that Auntie M and I read a portion of Scripture together every morning, right?”
Magdalena nodded.

“This morning,” Auntie L said, “we read how God’s character is unchangeable. So, we put our hope in the fact that God’s nature of love, mercy, and justice never changes, despite what’s going on around us. The passage we read said, ‘We have this hope as an anchor for the soul.’”

For Magdalena, the anchor that had meant “Fighting Polish” now served as a reminder that the Lord was the anchor of her soul. No matter the outcome of the war, no matter how grim things got, God was still a God of love and would prevail.

The theme of young people actively involved in real warfare is not a common one in young adult novels. However, there seems to be a lot of speculative fiction published for YA in which there is some type of struggle going on. What do you think might be a reason for this? Youth are discouraged by today’s looming problems. As adults try to tackle them, the problems either grow worse, or appear insurmountable. The daily news serves as an example of how leaders fail to give direction to their countries, parents fail to build vital families, and individuals fail at life, choosing instead to numb or medicate themselves to avoid the pain of their bad choices. Feeling powerless, today’s youth often seek to live vicariously through the lives of speculative, fantasy, or dystopian figures who overcome great obstacles. As Christian writers, we need to let youth experience the triumph of historical people their age—historical counterparts who overcame a sense of helplessness through finding and growing in a relationship with the Lord, our all-powerful, all-loving God.

Is there anything you would like to say to other Young Adult authors, particular about writing historical fiction? I’ve recently helped a few of my local Middle Grade and YA authors form a group we call Family-Friendly Fiction Writers. We’re in the initial stages, but our goal is to “provide middle-grade and young adult readers with adventurous, humorous, and inspiring fiction that touches both their minds and their hearts.” To other YA authors, I’d say find a group of like-minded writers, pray together, encourage each other, then get out there and place your books in the hands of today’s youth, especially historical fiction. Let students see how God works in the real world through your fictional and historical characters. Let them “taste and see that the Lord is good.”

Thank you, Marie, for sharing this book with my blog readers and me.

Readers, here’s a link to the book.

https://www.amazon.com/Underground-Scouts-WWII-Rising-Hope/dp/1957344393/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1679517097&sr=1-1

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