Number the Stars Summary

Number the Stars has 17 chapters plus an afterword, and every chapter is titled with a line of dialogue or a question from inside the story, which is why the contents page reads like the book in miniature:

Copenhagen under occupation (chapters 1-4)

• 1. Why Are You Running? — Annemarie, Ellen and Kirsti are stopped by soldiers on the corner
• 2. Who Is the Man Who Rides Past? — stories about King Christian X and what Denmark's bodyguard means
• 3. Where Is Mrs. Hirsch? — the button shop is shut and sealed, and the roundups begin
• 4. It Will Be a Long Night — the rabbi warns the congregation; Ellen comes to stay

Ellen becomes a Johansen (chapters 5-7)

• 5. Who Is the Dark-Haired One? — soldiers search the flat at night, and Annemarie tears the Star of David from Ellen's neck
• 6. Is the Weather Good for Fishing? — the coded telephone call, and the journey north
• 7. The House by the Sea — Uncle Henrik's farm at Gilleleje, with Sweden visible across the water

The funeral that is not a funeral (chapters 8-11)

• 8. There Has Been a Death — a casket appears in the living room for a great-aunt who never existed
• 9. Why Are You Lying? — Henrik explains that it is easier to be brave if you do not know everything
• 10. Let Us Open the Casket — soldiers arrive at the wake and Mama talks them out of it
• 11. Will We See You Again Soon, Peter? — the mourners leave for the boat in small groups

Annemarie's run (chapters 12-15)

• 12. Where Was Mama? — Mama is hours late and Annemarie finds her injured on the path
• 13. Run! As Fast As You Can! — the dropped packet, and the errand nobody else can do
• 14. On the Dark Path — the woods, and Annemarie deciding to be a silly little girl
• 15. My Dogs Smell Meat! — the soldiers, the dogs, and the handkerchief in the basket

After (chapters 16-17 and the afterword)

• 16. I Will Tell You Just a Little — Henrik finally explains what she carried and why it mattered
• 17. All This Long Time — two years on: the end of the war, Peter's death, and Ellen's necklace

The afterword steps outside the novel to separate the history from the fiction.

This Number the Stars summary begins with a footrace. Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen are running down a Copenhagen street in September 1943 when two German soldiers stop them, ask why they are running, and make an ugly remark about Annemarie's little sister Kirsti's hair. The girls have grown up with soldiers on the corner — Denmark surrendered in a morning, three years earlier — and the occupation has become a background fact, like rationing and the shortage of butter and shoes made of fish skin.

Then the background moves to the front. Mrs. Hirsch's button shop is padlocked with a German notice on it. On the Jewish New Year, the rabbi tells his congregation that the Germans have taken the synagogue's records and intend to "relocate" Denmark's Jews. The Rosens go into hiding, and Ellen simply moves into Annemarie's bedroom as the third Johansen daughter — a role made plausible by a real absence, because the eldest Johansen girl, Lise, died in an accident two weeks before her wedding.

The first test comes that night. Soldiers hammer on the door and search the flat, and one of them notices that Ellen, dark-haired, does not look like her blonde sisters. Annemarie, lying beside her, rips the Star of David necklace from Ellen's neck and closes her fist around it. Papa produces the family's baby photographs and reads out the names; the officer looks at the picture of an infant with dark wispy curls labelled Lise Margrete, tears it in half and leaves. When Annemarie opens her hand, the star is printed into her palm.

Because the flat is no longer safe, Mama takes the three girls north to her brother Henrik, a fisherman at Gilleleje, where Sweden is a smudge on the horizon. Henrik asks a strange question on the telephone — is the weather good for fishing? — and Annemarie starts to notice how many of the adults' sentences have two meanings. The next evening a plain wooden casket is carried into Henrik's living room and Mama announces that Great-aunt Birte has died. Annemarie knows for a fact that there is no Great-aunt Birte, and when she says so, Henrik does not deny it. He tells her instead that it is much easier to be brave if you do not know everything, and that he and her mother know only what they need to know.

That night the house fills with strangers: the Rosens, and others, sitting a wake for a woman who never existed. Peter Neilsen — Lise's fiancé, red-haired, now deep in the Resistance — arrives, draws the curtains and reads a psalm aloud, the one about the God who heals the broken in spirit and numbers the stars one by one. Annemarie looks at the window and thinks the sky is too big for anyone to count. Then German soldiers walk in and demand to know why the casket is closed. Mama tells them, evenly, that the old woman died of typhus and the doctor advised against opening it; an officer slaps her across the face and leaves. Afterwards the lid comes off. Inside are blankets and warm clothing for people who are about to cross the sea at night.

The mourners leave in twos and threes for Henrik's boat. Ellen and Annemarie say goodbye without being allowed to say what it is. Mama walks the last group down through the woods and does not come back for hours; Annemarie finally goes out at dawn and finds her crawling up the path with a broken ankle — and finds, lying in the grass where Mr. Rosen dropped it, the small packet Peter had given him to deliver.

So the last quarter of the book belongs to a ten-year-old with a basket. Mama tells her to run, to take the packet to Henrik at the harbour, and, if anyone stops her, to be exactly what she looks like: a silly little girl bringing her uncle his lunch. Four soldiers with dogs stop her at the edge of the woods. Annemarie plays dense and chatty while they empty the basket, find bread and cheese and a crumpled handkerchief, sniff at it and throw it back. She gets to the harbour. Henrik takes the basket, and the boat goes out.

Only afterwards does he tell her what she carried. The handkerchief was the point of the whole errand: treated so that it would ruin the dogs' sense of smell for long enough to hide a hold full of people from the German patrols. Ellen's family reaches Sweden. Annemarie has done the one thing the adults could not do for themselves, and she has done it without being told what it was.

Number the Stars ends twice: once with the boat, and once two years later.

The immediate ending comes in chapter 16, when Uncle Henrik finally explains the errand. The crumpled handkerchief Annemarie carried through the woods had been treated with a mixture that first attracted the German dogs and then destroyed their sense of smell — Lowry confirms in the afterword that this was real, made from rabbit's blood and cocaine, and that it is what allowed Danish fishermen to hide Jewish passengers under the deck boards while their boats were searched. Without it the dogs would have found the Rosens in Henrik's hold. Annemarie, who spent the night before being told nothing, turns out to have been the one thing standing between her friend and a train.

Chapter 17, "All This Long Time", jumps to May 1945. The war is over, flags are hanging from every window in Copenhagen, and Annemarie is twelve. The joy is not clean. Peter Neilsen is dead — captured and executed by the Germans in the public square at Ryvangen, having written home the night before that he loved them, that he was not afraid, and that he was proud of what he had done. He asked to be buried beside Lise, and even that was refused: the Nazis buried the men they shot at Ryvangen where they fell and marked the graves only with numbers.

That is also the night Annemarie's parents finally tell her the truth about her sister. Lise had been in the Resistance too — they did not know until Peter told them after her death — and the accident that killed her was a car deliberately driven at her by German soldiers.

The last scene is small on purpose. Annemarie opens Lise's blue trunk, takes out the yellowing wedding dress, and finds in the folds of the skirt the Star of David she tore from Ellen's neck two years earlier. She asks her father to repair the clasp so that she can give it back when the Rosens come home, and says that until then she will wear it herself. The Rosens survived; the book does not show them returning, and it does not pretend that everything lost was recoverable.

The lines readers and classrooms return to in Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, quoted verbatim:

"But," he added, "it is much easier to be brave if you do not know everything. And so your mama does not know everything. Neither do I. We know only what we need to know."

"I think you are like your mama, and like your papa, and like me. Frightened, but determined, and if the time came to be brave, I am quite sure you would be very, very brave."

"It is he who heals the broken in spirit and binds up their wounds, he who numbers the stars one by one..."

"She was part of the Resistance, too," Papa had explained. "Part of the group that fought for our country in whatever ways they could."

The third is the psalm Peter reads at the fake wake, and it is where the title comes from — Annemarie looks out at the sky afterwards and decides no one could possibly count them all.