Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

Title: Number the Stars
Author: Lois Lowry
Publication: Houghton Mifflin paperback, originally published in 1989
Genre: Juvenile Historical Fiction
Setting: WWII Denmark

Description: In 1943, Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen are ten, live in the same apartment building in Copenhagen, and are both afraid of the German soldiers who occupy their country. While the girls play with Kristi, Annemarie’s pesky little sister, the adults worry about the Nazis. When the Rosens’ rabbi warns his Jewish congregation that soldiers have taken their names and are coming for them, Annemarie’s family pretends Ellen is another daughter while her parents flee to the country. As Annemarie realizes the adults are not telling her what is going on, she learns that occupied Denmark is willing to take great risks to ensure the safety of as many of their Jewish neighbors as possible and that she has a part to play in saving her friend.

My Impression: Number the Stars won the Newbery Medal in 1990 but I had just started working at Bantam Doubleday Dell and was preoccupied with the books Bantam was publishing so had not read it previously. Although I have read more than my share of WWII fiction, until I watched Atlantic Crossing, the miniseries based on the friendship of Franklin Roosevelt and Norwegian Crown Princess Martha, I had not spent much time thinking about the Scandinavian countries during the war. Lowry was inspired to write this story because of a Danish friend who had been a child during the long Occupation by the Germans and told her how the brave Danes smuggled nearly 7,000 Jews to safety in Sweden.

The book is told from Annemarie’s perspective and aimed at children of 9 or 10, so the atrocities of the war are not fully revealed but the German soldiers are still extremely frightening and a sense of danger pervades the story. Lowry’s characters, especially Annemarie and Peter Nielsen, a Resistance hero based on a real person, are vividly drawn and capture the imagination of the reader. I particularly liked how she wove in stories about King Christian X and the affection of his subjects, and how Annemarie amuses her sister with fairy tales but is about to take part in her own epic adventure. I can see why (as Lowry mentions in an introduction to this edition) she receives letters not merely from young readers but from those who remembered and are reading it with their children.

The title of the book comes from Psalm 147:4 which describes how God numbered all the stars and named each of them. Coincidentally, it is during the services for Rosh Hashanah that the Rabbi warns his congregation the German soldiers are going to come and “relocate” and I just realized this year the Jewish New Year began at sundown tonight.

I read this for the de Grummond Book Group (the assignment was to read any book by Lois Lowry, which isn’t as enjoyable as reading and discussing the same book) and it’s my twenty-second book for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge hosted by The Intrepid Reader. A funny thing about Lowry that I never knew is she lived on Governors Island in NY for several teenage years like a Janet Lambert heroine!

Source: Library