Number the Stars

Ten year old Annemarie Johansen is living in Nazi occupied Copenhagen in 1943 when her best friend Ellen Rosen, who is Jewish, is put in real danger as German forces begin rounding up Danish Jews for deportation. Annemarie's family hides Ellen and, when German soldiers search the apartment, passes her off as Annemarie's own dead sister Lise; the soldiers nearly catch the lie until Annemarie's mother produces an old photograph proving Lise had dark hair like Ellen's. The family travels to the coastal home of Annemarie's uncle Henrik, where Jewish refugees, the Rosens among them, gather under cover of a staged funeral for a fictional Great Aunt Birte. When soldiers demand to open the casket, Annemarie's mother claims the body carries typhus, and the soldiers back off rather than risk infection.

Annemarie is asked to carry a small packet to her uncle, not knowing at first that it contains a handkerchief treated to throw off the scent dogs used to track fleeing refugees, and her delivery, made alone and terrified, helps get the Rosens and the others safely across to Sweden. Two years later, after the war ends, Annemarie learns that Peter, engaged to her late sister Lise and active in the Danish resistance, was executed by the Germans and buried in an unmarked grave. She finds Ellen's Star of David necklace, has her father repair its broken clasp, and decides to wear it herself until Ellen can come home to Denmark and claim it again.

Lowry writes for a young audience without softening the danger, but she also keeps the worst of the violence just offstage, which lets the book work as a real introduction to the Holocaust for readers not yet ready for its fuller horror, tense and readable in a single sitting rather than difficult going.