Editors Reads Verdict
The most widely read account of the Danish rescue of the Jews in fiction — based on true events and written with the precision that Lowry brings to all her historical work. The simplicity of the narrative structure gives the moral content its maximum weight.
What We Loved
- The decision to focus on a child narrator makes the moral stakes legible without reducing their complexity
- Based on historical fact, with an author's afterword that grounds the fiction in the documented record
- Lowry's control of narrative pace is extraordinary — the tension builds and releases exactly when it needs to
- The novel does not sentimentalize or oversimplify; it is honest about what people risked and why
Minor Drawbacks
- The brevity, while a formal strength, means that several characters remain underdeveloped
- Readers who come after The Giver may find the more straightforward narrative structure less interesting
- The resolution is somewhat compressed relative to the build-up
Key Takeaways
- → Ordinary people under occupation make choices that have moral weight — the Danish rescue was not organized resistance but thousands of individual decisions
- → Courage in children's literature is not the absence of fear but the choice to act despite it
- → The things that seem small — a handshake, a basket, a boat ride — are the mechanisms by which large moral facts are decided
- → Historical fiction has a specific responsibility to the documented record that shapes what a story is permitted to do
| Author | Lois Lowry |
|---|---|
| Publisher | HMH Books |
| Pages | 160 |
| Published | April 1, 1989 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Young Adult Fiction, Historical Fiction, World War II |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Young readers encountering the Holocaust and World War II for the first time through fiction; readers of any age interested in the Danish rescue and in what ordinary courage looks like when it is actually required. |
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Number the Stars" about?
Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen helps her Jewish best friend's family escape to Sweden during the Nazi occupation of Denmark in 1943, in Lowry's Newbery Medal-winning novel based on true events.
Who should read "Number the Stars"?
Young readers encountering the Holocaust and World War II for the first time through fiction; readers of any age interested in the Danish rescue and in what ordinary courage looks like when it is actually required.
What are the key takeaways from "Number the Stars"?
Ordinary people under occupation make choices that have moral weight — the Danish rescue was not organized resistance but thousands of individual decisions Courage in children's literature is not the absence of fear but the choice to act despite it The things that seem small — a handshake, a basket, a boat ride — are the mechanisms by which large moral facts are decided Historical fiction has a specific responsibility to the documented record that shapes what a story is permitted to do
Is "Number the Stars" worth reading?
The most widely read account of the Danish rescue of the Jews in fiction — based on true events and written with the precision that Lowry brings to all her historical work. The simplicity of the narrative structure gives the moral content its maximum weight.
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