A Book A Week: Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1989 (personal copy)

By telling the story of one family, of one girl, Lowry delivers the story of en entire nation. During World War II, in occupied Denmark, Annemarie Johansen and her family help her best friend Ellen and her family escape Nazi capture to the safety of Sweden. This is a beautiful, dramatic, suspenseful, middle-grade fiction that illustrates several truths about humanity. 

Lowry’s Afterword explains how she came to tell the story, the research she did and her reasons for writing it. The passage that brought me to tears, the moment that made her determined to tell the story, was finding a photograph of a young man who was a member of Denmark’s Resistance. She quotes a letter written by the man to his mother the night before his execution: “… and I want you all to remember — that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one.” Lowry goes on to say that she hopes that “the story of Denmark, and its people, will remind us all that such a world is possible.”

We cannot in our world suffer any intolerance like that which Lowry shares with the story of Annemarie. We cannot allow the torment of any Jew, Christian, Muslim, Atheist, any person of any color or sexual orientation or other discriminating feature. We must embrace and empathize with our neighbors in the world and mingle our pride. Not to dilute that which makes us individuals, but to celebrate our shared humanity and difference. Let us not simply tolerate each other, but instead let us love, respect, and protect each other. Let us lift each other up.