"Number the Stars" by Lois Lowry, Introduction and Afterword

But Number the Stars seems to have acquired its own long and vibrant life; not a day goes by that I don’t hear from a passionate reader of the book—some of them parents who remember it from their childhood and are now reading it with their own children.

And ten—the age of Annemarie in Number the Stars, and the approximate age of most of the book’s readers—is an age when young people are beginning to develop a strong set of personal ethics.

We all know how easy it is, and how futile, to blame and to hate.

Everywhere children are still reading about the integrity that a small Scandinavian population showed almost seventy years ago.

The Danish friend who originally told me the story of her childhood in Copenhagen in 1943, and who became the prototype for the fictional Annemarie, is an old woman now.

We both love thinking of the children reading the story today, coming to it for the first time and realizing that once, for a brief time and in a small place, a group of prejudice-free people honored the humanity of others.

Annemarie Johansen is a child of my imagination, though she grew there from the stories told to me by my friend Annelise Platt, to whom this book is dedicated, who was herself a child in Copenhagen during the long years of the German occupation.

I had always been fascinated and moved by Annelise’s descriptions not only of the personal deprivation that her family and their neighbors suffered during those years, and the sacrifices they made, but even more by the greater picture she drew for me of the courage and integrity of the Danish people under the leadership of the king they loved so much, Christian X.

So—surely with great sorrow—King Christian surrendered, and overnight the soldiers moved in.

It is true that he rode alone on his horse from the palace every morning, unguarded, and greeted his people; and though it seems so charming as to be a flight of author’s fancy, the story that Papa told Annemarie, of the soldier who asked the Danish teenager, “Who is that man?”—that story is recorded in one of the documents that still remain from that time.

The rabbi knew because a high German official told the Danish government, which passed the information along to the leaders of the Jewish community. The name of that German was G. F. Duckwitz, and I hope that even today, so many years later, there are flowers on his grave, because he was a man of compassion and courage.

Almost every boat captain used such a permeated handkerchief, and many lives were saved by the device.

The secret operations that saved the Jews were orchestrated by the Danish Resistance, which, like all Resistance movements, was composed mainly of the very young and very brave.

Peter Neilsen, though he is fictional, represents those courageous and idealistic young people, so many of whom died at the hands of the enemy.

I read his story as I had read many others, turning the pages, skimming here and there: this sabotage, that tactic, this capture, that escape.