Summary Of Marc Kilgour

This novel takes place deep inside Nazi Germany at the time when things were at its worst. 1942 was one of the darkest years our world has come to see. Not only was it looking as if the axis powers were bound to win the war but also the first horrific details came to life from survivors from the terrible prison camps. Many of the people the reader encounters in this novel are living terrible day to day lives and are too scared to put up a fight. The people with any sort of significant powers are usually very cruel and try to make others life miserable. The culture created by the Nazis is a culture of terror driven by fear and brutality.

The novel opens in Frankfurt, may 1942. Marc Kilgour, the main character is aged fifteen and is in a Nazi labour camp. Marc comes off as a normal lad, but the truth is that he 's an orphan that was then recruited by an english spy organization named Cherub. Because he is well educated he has a job of filling documents. With this job he is able to forge documents and arrange an escape for himself and his his two best friends at the camp. His two friends are able to escape but Marc is sent back to the prison camp. It doesn 't take long until his old bullies notice he is not protected by his friends and start a fight with him and knock him out. When Marc regains consciousness, his old commandant has been replaced by a new commandant who works out that he tried to escape and he is reassigned as a sewage system cleaner. He quickly realizes that all the other prisoners are worked so hard they have no ambition to escape so when he gets a chance he bolts. During his escape he is forced to kill several German guards. After hiding out for a few days Mark admits to his old Identity and is sent back to the orphanage where he grew up. He spends two month at the orphanage, where he works at a neighbouring farm and falls in love with a girls named Jae. However, this utopia is brought to a end when Marc finds two Canadian soldiers who landed at the unsuccessful landings at Dieppe and they help him get back in contact with the resistance group Cherub. The two Canadians together with Mark plan an escape back to England, which proves successful. The novel closes when Mark is reunited with his friends from Cherub but still misses Jae. This passage does not only define Mark’s character of escape and forward-thinking but it also describes the terrible settings Mark is living in. At this moment Mark is permanently convinced he must escape from these horrid conditions before he turns into one of these exhausted, timid men he was working with. This passage is a great description of the terrible living conditions Mark has to deal with day to day. …show more content…
Not only is Mark forced to wo rk between nine and twelve hours a day Mark is also living in a complete absence of an hygiene. Here is an example of the complete lack of hygiene the prisoners where forced to live in: “Leonard said everyone got sick in this job. He reckoned the first few weeks were worst for picking up infections because you gradually built up immunity. The big long-term danger was exposure to chemicals in the factory run off.” In my eyes the graphic depiction of the horrific living conditions, such as this one, “‘Losing all my nails,’ Leonard said, proving his point by peeling back a yellowed thumbnail that flipped up like a car door.” is one of the many reasons this passage emerges over others. It only takes two days at his new job to convince Mark that he must escape. It isn’t until this passage where Mark decides escaping is a must-do. He still doesn 't know how he will get out of this camp but he knows that if he stays at the camp he will probably die before he turns sixteen. “Marc felt awful: when it seemed life could get no worse there was always some new depth to plumb. His feverish mind thought about escape, but how could that happen when he could barely move.?” No longer then twenty four