Number the Stars
Authors: Lois Lowry
Who Is the Man Who Rides Past?
Is the Weather Good for Fishing?
Will We See You Again Soon, Peter?
Copyright © 1989 by Lois Lowry
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Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1989.
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For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Lowry, Lois.
Number the stars / Lois Lowry.
p. cm.
Summary: In 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark, ten-year-old Annemarie learns how to be brave and courageous when she helps shelter her Jewish friend from the Nazis.
1. World War, 1939â1945âDenmarkâJuvenile fiction. [1. World War, 1939â1945âDenmarkâFiction. 2. World War, 1939â1945âJewsâRescueâFiction. 3. FriendshipâFiction. 4. DenmarkâFiction.]
I. Title.
PZ7.L9673Nu 1989 88-37134
[Fic]âdc19 CIP
AC
ISBN: 978-0-395-51060-5 hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-547-57709-8 paperback
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eISBN 978-0-547-34544-4
v4.1214
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IntroductionFor my friend Annelise Platt
Tusind tak
It's hard to believe that I wrote
Number the Stars
more than twenty years ago. It seems like yesterday that I answered the phone on a snowy January morning and received the news that it had been awarded the 1990 Newbery Medal.
Most books published that long ago have faded into a pleasant, undisturbed retirement on dusty library shelves, or become an occasional topic for a research paper. But
Number the Stars
seems to have acquired its own long and vibrant life; not a day goes by that I don't hear from a passionate reader of the bookâsome of them parents who remember it from their childhood and are now reading it with their own children.
I think readers of every age match themselves against the protagonists of books they love.
Would I have done that?
they ask themselves as they follow a fictional character through a novel.
What choice would I have made?
And tenâthe age of Annemarie in
Number the Stars,
and the approximate age of most of the book's readersâis an age when young people are beginning to develop a strong set of personal ethics. They want to be honorable people. They want to do the right thing. 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.
So they follow a story about a girl their age, caught in a frightening situation, who must make decisions. She could take the easy way out. She could turn her back on her friend. (As the readers of
Number the Stars
grow older and read other Holocaust literature, they'll find that many people in other countries, not Denmark, did just that). Young readers rejoice when Annemarie takes a deep breath, enters the woods, faces the danger, stands up to the enemy, and triumphs.
When the book was newly published, it found its way into the hands and hearts of children who had read about but never experienced war. Now, sadly, I have heard from young readers who have lost a parent or an older brother in Iraq or Afghanistan. We all know how easy it is, and how futile, to blame and to hate.
I think the history of Denmark has much to teach us all.
The book has been published in many countries now, translated into countless different languages from Hungarian to Hebrew. Everywhere children are still reading about the integrity that a small Scandinavian population showed almost seventy years ago. Books do change lives, I know; and many readers have told me that
Number the Stars
changed theirs when they were young, that it made them think about both cruelty and courage. “It was something that shaped my idea of how people should be treated,” wrote a young woman recently, recalling her own fourth grade experience with the book.
The Danish friend who originally told me the story of her childhood in Copenhagen in 1943, and who became the prototype for the fictional Annemarie, is an old woman now. So am I. We both love thinking of the children reading the story today, coming to it for the first time and realizing that once, for a brief time and in a small place, a group of prejudice-free people honored the humanity of others.
Lois Lowry
1
“I'll race you to the corner, Ellen!” Annemarie adjusted the thick leather pack on her back so that her schoolbooks balanced evenly. “Ready?” She looked at her best friend.
Ellen made a face. “No,” she said, laughing. “You know I can't beat you âmy legs aren't as long. Can't we just walk, like civilized people?” She was a stocky ten-year-old, unlike lanky Annemarie.
“We have to practice for the athletic meet on FridayâI
know
I'm going to win the girls' race this week. I was second last week, but I've been practicing every day. Come on, Ellen,” Annemarie pleaded, eyeing the distance to the next corner of the Copenhagen street. “Please?”
Ellen hesitated, then nodded and shifted her own rucksack of books against her shoulders. “Oh, all right. Ready,” she said.
“Go!” shouted Annemarie, and the two girls were off, racing along the residential sidewalk. Annemarie's silvery blond hair flew behind her, and Ellen's dark pigtails bounced against her shoulders.
“Wait for me!” wailed little Kirsti, left behind, but the two older girls weren't listening.
Annemarie outdistanced her friend quickly, even though one of her shoes came untied as she sped along the street called Ãsterbrogade, past the small shops and cafés of her neighborhood here in northeast Copenhagen. Laughing, she skirted an elderly lady in black who carried a shopping bag made of string. A young woman pushing a baby in a carriage moved aside to make way. The corner was just ahead.
Annemarie looked up, panting, just as she reached the corner. Her laughter stopped. Her heart seemed to skip a beat.
“
Halte!
” the soldier ordered in a stern voice.
The German word was as familiar as it was frightening. Annemarie had heard it often enough before, but it had never been directed at her until now.
Behind her, Ellen also slowed and stopped. Far back, little Kirsti was plodding along, her face in a pout because the girls hadn't waited for her.
Annemarie stared up. There were two of them. That meant two helmets, two sets of cold eyes glaring at her, and four tall shiny boots planted firmly on the sidewalk, blocking her path to home.
And it meant two rifles, gripped in the hands of the soldiers. She stared at the rifles first. Then, finally, she looked into the face of the soldier who had ordered her to halt.
“Why are you running?” the harsh voice asked. His Danish was very poor. Three years, Annemarie thought with contempt. Three years they've been in our country, and still they can't speak our language.
“I was racing with my friend,” she answered politely. “We have races at school every Friday, and I want to do well, so Iâ” Her voice trailed away, the sentence unfinished. Don't talk so much, she told herself. Just answer them, that's all.
She glanced back. Ellen was motionless on the sidewalk, a few yards behind her. Farther back, Kirsti was still sulking, and walking slowly toward the corner. Nearby, a woman had come to the doorway of a shop and was standing silently, watching.
One of the soldiers, the taller one, moved toward her. Annemarie recognized him as the one she and Ellen always called, in whispers, “the Giraffe” because of his height and the long neck that extended from his stiff collar. He and his partner were always on this corner.
He prodded the corner of her backpack with the stock of his rifle. Annemarie trembled. “What is in here?” he asked loudly. From the corner of her eye, she saw the shopkeeper move quietly back into the shadows of the doorway, out of sight.
“Schoolbooks,” she answered truthfully.
“Are you a good student?” the soldier asked. He seemed to be sneering.
“Yes.”
“What is your name?”
“Annemarie Johansen.”
“Your friendâis she a good student, too?” lie was looking beyond her, at Ellen, who hadn't moved.
Annemarie looked back, too, and saw that Ellen's face, usually rosy-cheeked, was pale, and her dark eyes were wide.
She nodded at the soldier. “Better than me,” she said.
“What is her name?”
“Ellen.”
“And who is this?” he asked, looking to Annemarie's side. Kirsti had appeared there suddenly, scowling at everyone.
“My little sister.” She reached down for Kirsti's hand, but Kirsti, always stubborn, refused it and put her hands on her hips defiantly.
The soldier reached down and stroked her little sister's short, tangled curls. Stand still, Kirsti, Annemarie ordered silently, praying that somehow the obstinate five-year-old would receive the message.
But Kirsti reached up and pushed the soldier's hand away. “
Don't
,” she said loudly.
Both soldiers began to laugh. They spoke to each other in rapid German that Annemarie couldn't understand.
“She is pretty, like my own little girl,” the tall one said in a more pleasant voice.
Annemarie tried to smile politely.
“Go home, all of you. Go study your schoolbooks. And don't run. You look like hoodlums when you run.”
The two soldiers turned away. Quickly Annemarie reached down again and grabbed her sister's hand before Kirsti could resist. Hurrying the little girl along, she rounded the corner. In a moment Ellen was beside her. They walked quickly, not speaking, with Kirsti between them, toward the large apartment building where both families lived.
When they were almost home, Ellen whispered suddenly, “I was so scared.”
“Me too,” Annemarie whispered back.
As they turned to enter their building, both girls looked straight ahead, toward the door. They did it purposely so that they would not catch the eyes or the attention of two more soldiers, who stood with their guns on this corner as well. Kirsti scurried ahead of them through the door, chattering about the picture she was bringing home from kindergarten to show Mama. For Kirsti, the soldiers were simply part of the landscape, something that had always been there, on every corner, as unimportant as lampposts, throughout her remembered life.
“Are you going to tell your mother?” Ellen asked Annemarie as they trudged together up the stairs. “I'm not. My mother would be upset.”
“No, I won't, either. Mama would probably scold me for running on the street.”
She said goodbye to Ellen on the second floor, where Ellen lived, and continued on to the third, practicing in her mind a cheerful greeting for her mother: a smile, a description of today's spelling test, in which she had done well.
But she was too late. Kirsti had gotten there first.
“And he poked Annemarie's book bag with his gun, and then he grabbed my hair!” Kirsti was chattering as she took off her sweater in the center of the apartment living room. “But I wasn't scared. Annemarie was, and Ellen, too. But not me!”
Mrs. Johansen rose quickly from the chair by the window where she'd been sitting. Mrs. Rosen, Ellen's mother, was there, too, in the opposite chair. They'd been having coffee together, as they did many afternoons. Of course it wasn't really coffee, though the mothers still called it that: “having coffee.” There had been no real coffee in Copenhagen since the beginning of the Nazi occupation. Not even any real tea. The mothers sipped at hot water flavored with herbs.
“Annemarie, what happened? What is Kirsti talking about?” her mother asked anxiously.
“Where's Ellen?” Mrs. Rosen had a frightened look.
“Ellen's in your apartment. She didn't realize you were here,” Annemarie explained. “Don't worry. It wasn't anything. It was the two soldiers who stand on the corner of Ãsterbrogadeâyou've seen them; you know the tall one with the long neck, the one who looks like a silly giraffe?” She told her mother and Mrs. Rosen of the incident, trying to make it sound humorous and unimportant. But their uneasy looks didn't change.
