"Number the Stars" by Lois Lowry

Number the Stars

a novel by Lois Lowry

John Newbery Medal

For my second historical fiction book, I chose Number the Stars for several reasons. First, I remember reading it as a child and wanted to revisit a book that has already had some impact on my life, just as I did with Out of the Dust. Second, my class at Matoaka used this book as one of our first guided reading group books. And lastly, I thought it would fit in nicely with the other books I'm working with right now: Out of the Dust features a young girl about the same age who is forced to show courage during difficult times in her country, and The Devil's Arithmetic, my one-on-one lesson book, is also about World War II, the Holocaust, and its associated Resistance movements.

This novel is unique in that, instead of focusing on a Jewish child who attempts to survive the Holocaust, the main character is a nine year-old blonde Danish girl named Annemarie Johansen, who proves incredible courage in helping her friends and other Danish Jews resist capture by Nazis. What also makes this book special is its emphasis on loyalty. Previous to German Occupation in 1940, Denmark was ruled by King Christian X, who stepped down from his throne to let the Germans occupy rather than let his people get killed in a senseless battle of Resistance. Similarly, when the Germans were coming to take over the Danish fleet in their harbor, the Danish sailors blew up all of their own boats out of pride and loyalty so that the Germans could not control them. Throughout the Occupation, King Christian still continued his daily horseback rides through the city of Copenhagen, greeting his people, without bodyguards. One time, a German soldier saw him and asked a nearby teenager, "Who is that man who rides past here every morning on his horse?" (13). The boy told him cheekily that it was the King of Denmark; when the soldier probed as to where was his bodyguard, the boy responded, "All of Denmark is his bodyguard" (14). This story has been documented, and that record still exists today. This extreme sense of loyalty to King and country resonated throughout Denmark at this time, and as Number the Stars explains, this loyalty was immediately transferred to Danish Jews after their New Year in 1943 when Nazis began to capture them.

With these significant factors laid out, Lowry paints a phenomenal picture of suffering, bravery, emotion, and quick thinking, and relates these complex themes to young readers, both in and out of the context of the Occupation. Lowry's nuances are very in-depth and multi-faceted: she expresses the anger and blunt cruelty of the German soldiers, Annemarie's frustration with her five year-old blabber-mouth sister Kirsti, instances of the secret code used among Denmark resistance over the telephone, and the tactic of pretending to be a "silly little girl" or "playing dumb" as a child towards German soldiers so as not to reveal secret information entrusted to a child (114). One detail of the book that really stuck out to me was Lowry's multiple mentions of the food and materials rations in Copenhagen. She did a very good job making it clear that the absence of butter, coffee, cigarettes, rubber, and meat was now a way of life that the children understood, but she did so in a way that makes readers stop and think about how different and awful their lives would be without these things.

I liked how Annemarie's family never considered fending only for themselves an option: "it's what friends do" (128). The content and events in this novel definitely make readers grateful for the freedom from persecution that they hopefully experience today and achieve the vision of a "world of human decency" that Lowry hoped to create (137).