Norwich — As a “chubby, blond and cute” 3-year-old boy in 1943, Claus Trier Morch was enlisted by his father to sit quietly in a car atop a blanket covering weapons his father was smuggling to Danish resistance fighters as Denmark was in the grips of Nazi occupation.

The smuggling was successful, but as the toddler started bragging to friends about “his” guns and weapons, his nearly panicked parents were forced to rush to a local toy store to buy all the toy guns and bows and arrows in stock to prove to any inquiring German soldiers that the boy was just playing.

Like a veteran teacher and storyteller, Morch brought history textbooks, medicine and the fear of a distant war to life for 40 sixth- and seventh-graders at the Integrated Day Charter School on Tuesday.

But this was the first time the 76-year-old retired businessman and Clinton resident had addressed students on the heroic role his father played in the Danish resistance in World War II.

Teacher Elle Hampton's sixth-grade class sought out Morch after reading the novel “Number the Stars” by Lois Lowry that portrays the escape of a Jewish family to Sweden aboard a Danish fishing boat during the war. Jews hid beneath stocks of cod for the 3-mile trek to neutral Sweden.

Germans soldiers soon began searching the boats with dogs. While the book erroneously credited a Swedish man with inventing the invaluable formula spread in handkerchiefs to throw off the dogs' scent, Morch held up three post-war medals bestowed upon his father to set the record straight.

Dr. Ernst Trier Morch, a physician and veterinarian — he received a medal from the Danish king for saving a favorite horse — quietly traversed the worlds of Nazi occupation and Danish resistance, his son said.

Morch helped hide Jews in hospital quarantine wards. He distributed illegal newspapers on house calls and built a short-wave radio and relayed information from German military broadcasts to England.

Secrecy was so critical, Morch told the students, that his father and his uncle were unaware until after the war that both had been active in the resistance.

“The stories they would tell were better than the best James Bond or Star Wars movies I have ever seen,” Morch told the students.

When the crackdown against Danish Jews came, the tiny fishing boats went into action to smuggle hundreds of Jews to safety.

Dr. Morch and a pharmacist turned to their medicine cabinets and common sense to solve the problem of search dogs.

Dogs chase rabbits, so the pair obtained dried rabbit's blood — “it was like a Hershey bar or M&Ms to us,” Morch told the students. They laced it with cocaine, a nerve-numbing compound used at the time as an anesthetic.

Dr. Morch tried it on his own family's Cocker spaniel. “The dog couldn't smell a pizza if he was standing on it,” Morch said. But the dog ended up as a cocaine addict and soon died, he said.

“Awwww,” many students reacted.

“The dog was one of the casualties of the resistance,” Morch said.

Later in the war, as the tide was turning against Germany, Danish authorities organized “the White Bus,” caravans of hundreds of white buses driven to concentration camps to retrieve Danes and many others. 

In exchange for releasing prisoners, camp commanders could receive a post-war safe haven in Denmark — an attractive offer as Allied armies were bearing down on the camps.

Dr. Morch rode in a convoy bus to Buchenwald Concentration Camp in central Germany and ended up developing his second life-saving medical formula of the war.

Starved and emaciated camp survivors died quickly when offered regular food and milk. Dr. Morch figured out that small shots of beer, given every 30 minutes along with injected vitamins for the slow 10-day drive to Denmark, could save thousands.

The White Buses ended up saving about 280,000 concentration camp victims, Morch said.

As a reward for his wartime activities, Dr. Morch was offered admission into Oxford University, where he became Denmark's first licensed anesthesiologist.

The family immigrated to the United States in 1951, settling first in Chicago. Morch said his father eventually retired to Florida. He died in 1996.

Morch described his father as an “ordinary guy” thrust into world-changing events.

Asked by a student if he would do the same if he were in a war, Morch paused a few seconds.

“I hope so,” he said.

c.bessette@theday.com

Twitter: @Bessettetheday