Number the Stars

Copenhagen, 1943

The Danish rescue of the Jews in October 1943 is one of the most remarkable events in the history of the Second World War. When the German occupiers decided to deport Denmark’s approximately 7,500 Jewish citizens, the Danish population — organized not by a resistance movement but by an ad hoc network of neighbors, fishermen, clergy, and ordinary families — moved more than 7,000 people across the Øresund strait to neutral Sweden in the space of two weeks. The rescue was improvised, dangerous, and largely successful. It is an event with no precise parallel in occupied Europe.

Lois Lowry set Number the Stars in this historical moment and built her story around a fictional family whose experience is consistent with the documented record. Annemarie Johansen is ten years old, Danish, not Jewish. Her best friend Annemarie is Ellen Rosen, whose family has received word that the Germans are coming. Ellen spends the night at the Johansens’ apartment, and when German soldiers arrive in the middle of the night demanding to know who the blonde girl in the photograph is, Annemarie’s father tells them she is his third daughter — and convinces them, using the physical differences between his own daughters as evidence. It is the novel’s first act of courage and it is performed through ordinary family love, not through any organized heroism.

The Child’s-Eye View as Moral Instrument

Lowry’s decision to tell this story through Annemarie’s perspective — a child who is brave without fully understanding why, who is frightened without fully understanding the scale of what she is frightened of — is the novel’s central formal choice. Annemarie does not know what a concentration camp is. She does not know the full history of what is happening to Europe’s Jews. She knows that her friend is in danger, that her family has decided to help, and that she has been given a task that is frightening and that she must complete anyway.

This narrowing of perspective is not a simplification. It is a formal argument about how moral courage actually operates in practice. The Danish rescuers did not, in most cases, have access to the full picture. They made local, specific decisions — to take in a neighbor, to arrange a boat, to carry a basket — without knowing whether those decisions would succeed or what the consequences of failure would be. Annemarie’s incompleteness of understanding mirrors the incompleteness of understanding under which the historical actors operated, and it makes the moral choices in the novel feel real rather than inevitable.

The Historical Record and the Author’s Responsibility

Lowry includes a detailed author’s afterword in which she distinguishes between the fictional elements of the story and the historical facts on which it is based. The handkerchief that plays a central role in the climax of the novel — impregnated with a substance that destroys dogs’ sense of smell and thus prevents the German soldiers’ dogs from detecting the Jewish refugees hiding in a boat — is based on a real detail from the documented history of the rescue. The fictional Johansen family is not real, but the rescue routes, the timing, the mechanism, and the general shape of what ordinary Danish families did are.

This is not a decoration — it is part of the novel’s argument. Number the Stars makes a claim on the reader’s moral imagination that it can only make if the reader understands that the events it describes are not purely invented. The rescuers were real people who made real choices at real risk. The brevity of the novel — 160 pages — is calibrated to this claim: the story is as long as it needs to be to carry the historical weight it carries. Lowry does not elaborate for the sake of elaboration, and the restraint is the form’s respect for its subject.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — A model of what children’s historical fiction can achieve: the simplicity of the narrative gives the moral content its maximum weight, and the historical grounding means that what the reader receives is not just a story but a reckoning with what ordinary people actually did.

The Historical Foundation

Number the Stars, which won Lois Lowry the Newbery Medal in 1990, rests on one of the most extraordinary episodes of the Second World War: the Danish rescue of the country’s Jewish population in October 1943. When the German occupiers moved to deport Denmark’s roughly 7,500 Jewish citizens, an improvised network of neighbors, fishermen, clergy, and ordinary families ferried more than seven thousand people across the Øresund strait to neutral Sweden in a matter of weeks. The rescue was not the work of an organized resistance movement but of thousands of individual decisions made under occupation and at genuine risk — and it has no precise parallel anywhere in occupied Europe. Lowry built her fictional Johansen family to be consistent with this documented record, and the novel’s claim on the reader’s moral imagination depends on the understanding that what it describes is, in its essentials, true.

The Child’s-Eye View as Moral Instrument

Lowry’s central formal decision is to filter the story through ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen, who is brave without fully grasping why and frightened without fully comprehending the scale of what she fears. She does not know what a concentration camp is; she does not know the full history unfolding across Europe. She knows that her best friend Ellen is in danger, that her family has chosen to help, and that she has been given a frightening task she must complete anyway. This narrowing of perspective is not a simplification but a formal argument about how moral courage actually operates. The Danish rescuers themselves rarely had the full picture; they made local, specific decisions — to shelter a neighbor, to arrange a boat, to carry a basket — without knowing whether they would succeed. Annemarie’s incomplete understanding mirrors theirs, and it makes the novel’s moral choices feel earned rather than inevitable.

Restraint as Respect

The novel runs to roughly 160 pages, and its brevity is calibrated rather than incidental. Lowry includes an author’s afterword distinguishing the fictional elements from the historical facts — including the real detail of the handkerchief treated to destroy the German dogs’ sense of smell, which allowed refugees to hide undetected in the boats. This grounding is part of the book’s argument, not a decoration: Number the Stars makes a claim it can only make if the reader understands that the rescuers were real people who made real choices at real risk. Lowry does not elaborate for elaboration’s sake, and the restraint is the form’s respect for its subject. It remains the most widely read fictional account of the Danish rescue, and a model of what children’s historical fiction can achieve when it trusts both its young readers and the weight of the record it draws on.