
Number the Stars
by Lois Lowry
The Nazis are rounding up Jews. Her family hides her best friend.
For you if
your child is ready to understand that ordinary people choose whether to protect each other or look away — and that the choice matters
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Copenhagen, 1943. Annemarie Johansen is ten years old when the Nazis begin rounding up Denmark's Jewish population. Her best friend Ellen is Jewish. Annemarie's family hides her, then helps smuggle her family to neutral Sweden with a fishing boat and a packet of special powder and more courage than any of them knew they had. Lowry based this on the true story of the Danish resistance — the only Nazi-occupied country that organized a mass rescue of its Jewish population. A Newbery Medal winner that tells children the truth: that ordinary people made the choice to hide their neighbors, and that this choice was available to everyone, and that most people in most countries did not make it.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Denmark • Europe
- Voice
- An outside perspective on Denmark
- Themes
- couragefriendship
Part of a Reading Journey
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Everything is Illuminated(2005)
dir. Liev Schreiber
Digging up a family's buried history.
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Why it’s here: Punk in blending absurdist comedy with Holocaust memory without ever trivializing either — the film trusts that grief and humor can share the same road trip. Pedagogical in showing how erased places and people can still be located, if someone is willing to look hard enough.

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For the grown-up bookshelf
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