Wouldn't You Lend A Hand to A Friend?

Number the Stars. 0-440-40327-8. Lois Lowry. 1989. Newbery Award. Ages 9-12. Danish and Jewish families during WWII.

Best friends Annemarie and Ellen live at the time of the German occupation of Denmark during World War II. When the Germans begin to actively relocate the Jews, Ellen’s parents go into hiding and Annemarie’s family pretends that Ellen is their oldest daughter, who really died a few years earlier. Annemarie’s mother takes Ellen and her girls to Uncle Henrik’s house to reunite Ellen with her parents and then smuggle them along with other Jews safely on a fishing boat to Sweden. During their covert operation, Ellen’s father trips and drops an important package that could mean life or death to Uncle Henrik and those in the boat. Because her mother is lame, Annemarie becomes brave and takes the package past the Nazi soldiers to Uncle Henrik’s boat. Because the package is successfully delivered, Ellen and her family escape. At the end of the story, Annemarie awaits her friend’s return to Denmark because the war is finally over.

This would be a great book to start a discussion about friendship and bravery. Children can write about a time when they needed to be brave, perhaps in dealing with a friendship. They could also describe their best friends’ traits and compare them with those of Annemarie and Ellen.

Lowry sets up the story with a believable friendship in her characters. The girls are relatable characters in that they go to school together, are good neighbors and good friends. There is no question that Annemarie will help her friend, even to the point of hiding her Jewish star necklace. Readers are easily able to be sympathetic to the other characters, even ones who are not fully developed, because Lowry shows how the situation they face is not under their control..

In addition to writing an excellent story about true friendship, Lowry does a nice job of placing the setting in a town occupied by Nazis. Readers get a sense of the fear and concern that the Nazi presence brings through the conversations between the girls and Annemarie’s mother.

The themes of bravery and friendship shine through this story about a horrible time in our world’s history, the Holocaust. By writing about a successful escape, she puts a different emphasis on this time that is more appropriate for her younger audience than a more graphic account of the extermination of Jews found in other books. Because of her target audience, Lowry fittingly moves the action quickly after establishing the problem of the relocation of the Jews so that her readers can see a good way to solve this problem.

This book would be appropriate in a Social Studies classroom, used alongside a book like The Book Thief to get a couple of different perspectives of people trying to do what they can to help prevent the extermination of the Jews during the time of the Holocaust. This could be followed up with some actual historic accounts, like The Diary of Anne Frank. This might also be a good book to compare how people helped each other at different points in history; for example, comparing the Johansens’ actions to those who helped African Americans through the Underground Railroad. Finally, students could use this book in a unit on bravery or friendship to review these aspects of their own lives.