Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry - Historical Fiction

I picked up Number the Stars at the bookstore because it was a historical fiction novel (and I needed one of those for my Journal blogging) and because Lois Lowry (the writer of The Giver) wrote it. I was so fascinated with The Giver that I was certain that if she used the same craft in Number the Stars that she employed in The Giver, that I would love this book. I was right, because I was drawn into Number the Stars instantly.

I enjoy books that have an undercurrent of realism and ironic events and characters embedded through the writing of historical fiction. Number the Stars is set in Copenhagen, Denmark during the Nazi Germany invasion. The Johansen’s are a typical Danish family that had three daughters who were going about their daily lives before their king, Christian X, surrendered to Germany, without a fight, because he had the knowledge that Denmark was a small country and that they would not survive a war. German soldiers get posted throughout town, curfews are issued for the citizens, electricity and foods are rationed, and blackout curtains are put up. Life changes even more dramatically when their oldest daughter, Lise, is killed in an accident. Like in The Giver, the reader really doesn’t find out about how Lise is killed immediately, but as we read the story, Lowry gives us a trail to follow until we realize that Lise was a member of the Resistance group and that one rainy night she was purposely run down by a car of the Nazi’s. The reader suspects something of this sort, with Lise being engaged to marry another boy, Peter, who is a Resistance member, but never really finds out until the end of the book exactly how she died. Another important plot in the book is that the Johansen’s are close friends with a Jewish family, the Rosen’s. The Nazi’s had not begun tormenting or capturing and relocating Jewish families and people in Denmark until recently, and now they must all hide and leave or be sent away to concentration camps. The Johansen’s are able to smuggle the Rosen’s to safety just in time. In fact, all of Denmark came together to make sure that their Jewish residents were cared for as much as possible.

There are so many powerful themes flooding the pages of Number the Stars, but the one that highly impacted me was the loss of innocence. Ten-year-old Annemarie is very grown-up for her age, having to be due to the events that are occurring in her country. She tries to occupy her time playing little girl games, like races and paper dolls. The foot races are abruptly stopped in the beginning by a German soldier who interrogates her and her best friend Ellen about running in the streets and the paper dolls are set aside when she begins remembering her own sister’s death and the night that it occurred. She even cares and pampers her little sister, Kirsten – who really is the only character who maintains a childlike trait throughout the story – by making up fairytale stories, that Annemarie no longer believes in.

My, how Lowry can weave irony and satire into her novels! Denmark is at war, in a silent, resistant way, with Germany, and the girls are playing pretend with paper dolls that they have named after the characters of Gone with the Wind. Annemarie comments that pretending to play Gone with the Wind is so much more exciting than pretending with fairytales. That made me smirk, because I always pretend-played fairy tales, because it was a different country and time period for me. That is the very reason that Annemarie is pretend-playing Gone with the Wind, because of a change in location and characters. I also found it ironic how Gone with the Wind is about war, the Civil War, which ravishes the main characters’ homes and changes their lives forever, same as the characters in Number the Stars lives are changed forever by a home front war. It is also about the prejudice and mistreatment of African Americans, just as the prejudices and mistreatments of the Jewish community are being played out in Denmark during this time period.

Lowry has a way of weaving so many interesting historical facts and information into her works and makes the characters come alive right before the reader’s eyes. I wanted to be there, helping smuggle Jewish people to safety.