Lois Lowry's 'Number The Stars'

Work Summary Lois Lowry’s 1989 novel Number the Stars tells the story of a ten-year-old Christian girl named Annemarie Johansen. Annemarie is living in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1943 when the story begins. Annemarie, her little sister Kirsti, and her best friend Ellen Rosen, a Jew, are walking home from school when the story begins. They decide to race but are stopped by two stern looking German soldiers. The soldiers question them, but let them go. When the girls reach their apartment home, they inform their mothers of the encounter with the soldiers. Their mothers seem extremely troubled by the story and tell the girls to go home from school a different way from then on. The soldiers on the street are not the only thing out of place however. Copenhagen has been hit by various effects of World War II. There is a shortage of almost everything. Five-year-old Kirsti Johansen experiences the shortages first hand when she has to buy “ugly” shoes made of fish scales due to the shortage of leather. Lowry uses Kirsti in various other parts of the story to show the struggles of Copenhagen in 1943. When Kirsti loses a button off of her coat, her mother tells her and Annemarie to stop by the button shop and buy a new button after school. However, when the girls go to the button shop, they find that it is closed. When they report
Annemarie is suspicious because she has never heard of a “Birtie,” so she asks her uncle about her death. Henrik reveals that she, as well as her death, is made-up, but that is all he can tell her. That night a funeral is held for “Aunt Birtie” and many guests Annemarie does not recognize are in attendance. These “guests” are Jewish refugees, including Ellen’s parents, and the casket is filled with coats and blankets. The plan is to take the Jews across the Baltic Sea to Sweden, a safe country where the Nazis have no