Title: Number The StarsType: StandaloneAuthor: Lois LowryRelease Date: Feb 9,1998Rating: 4 stars“And they are beginning to realize that the world they live in is a place where the right thing is often hard, sometimes dangerous, and frequently unpopular.Few lines from the letter of a young Danish Resistance leader kim Malthe-Bruun to his mother the night before he was executed. “...and I want you all to remember-that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one. That is the great gift our country hungers for, something every little peasant boy can look forward to, and with pleasure feel he is a part of-something he can work and fight for."Number The Stars is set in a tragic era in the history of mankind Denmark in 1943, during World War II.Denmark was under Nazi Occupation from 1943-1948 . The story revolves around 10 year old Annemarie Johansen and her Jewish friend Ellen Rosen and their families.Life in Denmark was very difficult during that time.Nazi soldiers were on every nooke and corner of the city. There were no enough food ,beverages or clothing for anyone and they were required to darken their windows after 8:00.Annemaries’s and Ellen’s families were very close. One the day of Jewish New year Ellen’s parent received a word from the church that all the Jewish families in Denmark were to be taken and ‘’relocated’’.Since then Ellen’s parents Mr. and Mrs. Rosen went hiding leaving Ellen with Annemaries’s family.Ellen pretended to be Annemaries’s late sister Lise when the soldiers came searching for the Rosens in Annemarie's apartment. Later that day Mrs. Johansen takes her two daughters and Ellen to her house in the north coast of Denmark where with the help of Peter Neilson,fiance of her late sister,Lise and her uncle Henrick helps them to escape to Sweden.In a great effort led by Peter, Denmark manages to smuggle almost the entire Jewish population (7,000 people) into Sweden, a Nazi-free country.Peter Neilson was later captured and executed by the Germans.Annemarie also learns that her late sister Lise was also in the resistance along with Peter and was shot by the Nazi’s.This book is all about the trouble they had to encounter and courage Annemarie had to show to help the Jewish families. Number The Star is written in a simple language making it easy for children to understand.There were at times when there was no logic in what they were doing,like how Mr Rosen had to take the ‘’packet’’ to Mr. Henrick when Peter could have directly handed it to him.I would rate this book Four out of five stars.
i read this in hardback, when it first came out, and i'd say it was probably the reason i became addicted to WWII/holocaust literature/history at such a young age. i think it helped that i was so young when i read this, as imagining a ten year old standing up to nazis was something remarkable, but imaginable for me. i loved annemarie, i identified with her in ways i can't really explain. i read this book again and again, and it never changed. there are scenes burned into my memory: the fake funeral, the ripping of ellen's necklace, annemarie with the special packet, the idea of all the jews packed into uncle henrik's boat. and annemarie running, running fast like she did at school when she beat all the boys, running with a basket and a red cape (only later would i figure out the clever little red riding hood allusion), her blond hair trailing. it also helped that i had great-grandmothers who remembered the war, a swedish au pair who told me about seeing denmark from sweden, and an insatiable curiosity about things like this - so i was looking up things on maps and reading about german shepherds and the "scent rags" and. even when it was card-catalogs and old books, i was a cross referencer. i have notes somewhere of my favorite quotes from the book. i also love the ending - because it doesn't condescend. the ending, unlike the book, is ambigious in its ending. we know the war is over, we know annemarie survived - but what does that mean for a little girl, after all?
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Yes, isn't it amazing that being on Goodreads more allows us to actually read less! I should get off Goodreads and read the book I"m trying to finish by tomorrow! :-)
—Ginny Messina
I read this book compulsively as a child. It was my introduction to the Holocaust. Like so many book-nerds, I read precociously and therefore got to a lot of books before I reached the prescribed grade-level. So, I read this book before the words "World War" or "genocide" ever reached my ears in a classroom. I was fascinated by it all in a very child-like way. I couldn't really understand why the Rosens were in danger, so when Annemarie's father explains the whole thing to her, he was explaining it to me as well. Growing up in the middle of nowhere, Michigan, I had never met a Jewish person in my life; they were, to me, nice people who lived in deserts in stories from Sunday school. They seemed like very unlikely subjects for hatred to me, and I felt quite sorry for Ellen and her family. It is, thankfully, a gentle book that doesn't really scratch the surface of what happened; I couldn't have handled pits of emaciated bodies or savagery. The fairly tame shootings and violence in the book unnerved me enough as it was. It takes place in occupied Amsterdam, not Berlin, and that war-time provincialism also helps de-intensify the subject matter. Most importantly, it's told through the view of a child, which I think speaks the most vividly to other children. An excellent book that could easily be required grade school reading.
—Briynne
On the back of the library's copy of this book is a review from The Horn Book Magazine that says "the whole book is seamless, compelling, and memorable -- impossible to put down; difficult to forget." Well, I was about to put that bold statement to the test: "difficult to forget," huh? What if you read this twenty years ago and have had two kids and subsequent serious sleep deprivation since then??Well, I can't remember items on my shopping list while I'm at the store, but I remembered a surprising number of details from this book once I started reading: the whole first scene of the three girls being stopped by Nazi soldiers on a Copenhagen street corner, the image of the Star of David charm imprinting itself on Annamarie's hand, the climactic walk to the fishing boat and being stopped by the soldiers with dogs. The scenes that had been subconsciously hidden in my mind for years unearthed themselves as I turned the pages -- indeed, it is a memorable book.The story is a courageous tale of fictional ten-year-old Annemarie -- and of the real citizens of World War II Denmark, who swiftly united to smuggle their Jewish population to Sweden, which was well worth learning about. Additionally, the writing is superb: somehow, Lowry manages to weave detail and plot together in a way that enriches young (and old) readers while not overwhelming them. Each word, each scene is crafted as though this were a poem rather than a novel-- don't be deceived by the thinness of this little book.Loved this book even more than I did in elementary school. It was definitely worth revisiting.
—Beth
