Number the Stars

What is Number the Stars about?

Copenhagen, 1943: ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen has grown used to German soldiers on the street corner, rationing and blacked-out windows, until the occupation turns personal and the Nazis begin rounding up Denmark's Jews. Her best friend Ellen Rosen moves into the Johansen flat overnight and is passed off as their own daughter Lise, the older sister who died before the war. The story follows the family north to the coast, to Uncle Henrik's house and his fishing boat, where the route to neutral Sweden runs and where the adults tell Annemarie only what she needs to know. Sent to the harbor on an errand whose importance she does not understand, she has to work out how much courage an ordinary girl is expected to have. Lowry drew on the historical rescue of almost all of Denmark's Jewish population; the book took the Newbery Medal in 1990.

Lois Lowry has won the Newbery Medal twice, for Number the Stars and for The Giver, and has written more than forty books for young readers, including the Anastasia Krupnik series.