Number the Stars
Lois Lowry

For my friend

Annelise Platt

Tusind tak

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

1. Why Are You Running?

2. Who Is the Man Who Rides Past?

3. Where Is Mrs. Hirsch?

4. It Will Be a Long Night

5. Who Is the Dark-Haired One?

6. Is the Weather Good for Fishing?

7. The House by the Sea

8. There Has Been a Death

9. Why Are You Lying?

10. Let Us Open the Casket

11. Will We See You Again Soon, Peter?

12. Where Was Mama?

13. Run! As Fast As You Can!

14. On the Dark Path

15. My Dogs Smell Meat!

16. I Will Tell You Just a Little

17. All This Long Time

Afterword

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

1 Why Are You Running?

“I’ll race you to the corner, Ellen!” Annemarie adjusted the thick leather pack on her back so that her schoolbooks balanced evenly. “Ready?” She looked at her best friend.

Ellen made a face. “No,” she said, laughing. “You know I can’t beat you – my legs aren’t as long. Can’t we just walk, like civilized people?” She was a stocky ten-year-old, unlike lanky Annemarie.

“We have to practice for the athletic meet on Friday – I know I’m going to win the girls’ race this week. I was second last week, but I’ve been practicing every day. Come on, Ellen,” Annemarie pleaded, eyeing the distance to the next corner of the Copenhagen street. “Please?”

Ellen hesitated, then nodded and shifted her own rucksack of books against her shoulders. “Oh, all right. Ready,” she said.

“Go!” shouted Annemarie, and the two girls were off, racing along the residential sidewalk. Annemarie’s silvery blond hair flew behind her, and Ellen’s dark pigtails bounced against her shoulders.

“Wait for me!” wailed little Kirsti, left behind, but the two older girls weren’t listening.

Annemarie outdistanced her friend quickly, even though one of her shoes came untied as she sped along the street called Østerbrogade, past the small shops and cafés of her neighborhood here in northeast Copenhagen. Laughing, she skirted an elderly lady in black who carried a shopping bag made of string. A young woman pushing a baby in a carriage moved aside to make way. The corner was just ahead.

Annemarie looked up, panting, just as she reached the corner. Her laughter stopped. Her heart seemed to skip a beat.

“Halte!” the soldier ordered in a stern voice.

The German word was as familiar as it was frightening. Annemarie had heard it often enough before, but it had never been directed at her until now.

Behind her, Ellen also slowed and stopped. Far back, little Kirsti was plodding along, her face in a pout because the girls hadn’t waited for her.

Annemarie stared up. There were two of them. That meant two helmets, two sets of cold eyes glaring at her, and four tall shiny boots planted firmly on the sidewalk, blocking her path to home.

And it meant two rifles, gripped in the hands of the soldiers. She stared at the rifles first. Then, finally, she looked into the face of the soldier who had ordered her to halt.

“Why are you running?” the harsh voice asked. His Danish was very poor. Three years, Annemarie thought with contempt. Three years they’ve been in our country, and still they can’t speak our language.

“I was racing with my friend,” she answered politely. “We have races at school every Friday, and I want to do well, so I— ” Her voice trailed away, the sentence unfinished. Don’t talk so much, she told herself. Just answer them, that’s all.

She glanced back. Ellen was motionless on the sidewalk, a few yards behind her. Farther back, Kirsti was still sulking, and walking slowly toward the corner. Nearby, a woman had come to the doorway of a shop and was standing silently, watching.

One of the soldiers, the taller one, moved toward her. Annemarie recognized him as the one she and Ellen always called, in whispers, “the Giraffe” because of his height and the long neck that extended from his stiff collar. He and his partner were always on this corner.

He prodded the corner of her backpack with the stock of his rifle. Annemarie trembled. “What is in here?” he asked loudly. From the corner of her eye, she saw the shopkeeper move quietly back into the shadows of the doorway, out of sight.

“Schoolbooks,” she answered truthfully.

“Are you a good student?” the soldier asked. He seemed to be sneering.

“Yes.”

“What is your name?”

“Annemarie Johansen.”

“Your friend – is she a good student, too?” He was looking beyond her, at Ellen, who hadn’t moved.

Annemarie looked back, too, and saw that Ellen’s face, usually rosy-cheeked, was pale, and her dark eyes were wide.

She nodded at the soldier. “Better than me,” she said.

“What is her name?”

“Ellen.”

“And who is this?” he asked, looking to Annemarie’s side. Kirsti had appeared there suddenly, scowling at everyone.

“My little sister.” She reached down for Kirsti’s hand, but Kirsti, always stubborn, refused it and put her hands on her hips defiantly.

The soldier reached down and stroked her little sister’s short, tangled curls. Stand still, Kirsti, Annemarie ordered silently, praying that somehow the obstinate five-year-old would receive the message.

But Kirsti reached up and pushed the soldier’s hand away. “Don’t,” she said loudly.

Both soldiers began to laugh. They spoke to each other in rapid German that Annemarie couldn’t understand.

“She is pretty, like my own little girl,” the tall one said in a more pleasant voice.

Annemarie tried to smile politely.

“Go home, all of you. Go study your schoolbooks. And don’t run. You look like hoodlums when you run.”

The two soldiers turned away. Quickly Annemarie reached down again and grabbed her sister’s hand before Kirsti could resist. Hurrying the little girl along, she rounded the corner. In a moment Ellen was beside her. They walked quickly, not speaking, with Kirsti between them, toward the large apartment building where both families lived.

When they were almost home, Ellen whispered suddenly, “I was so scared.”

“Me too,” Annemarie whispered back.

As they turned to enter their building, both girls looked straight ahead, toward the door. They did it purposely so that they would not catch the eyes or the attention of two more soldiers, who stood with their guns on this corner as well. Kirsti scurried ahead of them through the door, chattering about the picture she was bringing home from kindergarten to show Mama. For Kirsti, the soldiers were simply part of the landscape, something that had always been there, on every corner, as unimportant as lampposts, throughout her remembered life.

“Are you going to tell your mother?” Ellen asked Annemarie as they trudged together up the stairs. “I’m not. My mother would be upset.”

“No, I won’t, either. Mama would probably scold me for running on the street.”

She said goodbye to Ellen on the second floor, where Ellen lived, and continued on to the third, practicing in her mind a cheerful greeting for her mother: a smile, a description of today’s spelling test, in which she had done well.

But she was too late. Kirsti had gotten there first.

“And he poked Annemarie’s book bag with his gun, and then he grabbed my hair!” Kirsti was chattering as she took off her sweater in the center of the apartment living room. “But I wasn’t scared. Annemarie was, and Ellen, too. But not me!”

Mrs. Johansen rose quickly from the chair by the window where she’d been sitting. Mrs. Rosen, Ellen’s mother, was there, too, in the opposite chair. They’d been having coffee together, as they did many afternoons. Of course it wasn’t really coffee, though the mothers still called it that: “having coffee.” There had been no real coffee in Copenhagen since the beginning of the Nazi occupation. Not even any real tea. The mothers sipped at hot water flavored with herbs.

“Annemarie, what happened? What is Kirsti talking about?” her mother asked anxiously.

“Where’s Ellen?” Mrs. Rosen had a frightened look.

“Ellen’s in your apartment. She didn’t realize you were here,” Annemarie explained. “Don’t worry. It wasn’t anything. It was the two soldiers who stand on the corner of Østerbrogade – you’ve seen them; you know the tall one with the long neck, the one who looks like a silly giraffe?” She told her mother and Mrs. Rosen of the incident, trying to make it sound humorous and unimportant. But their uneasy looks didn’t change.

“I slapped his hand and shouted at him,” Kirsti announced importantly.

“No, she didn’t, Mama,” Annemarie reassured her mother. “She’s exaggerating, as she always does.”

Mrs. Johansen moved to the window and looked down to the street below. The Copenhagen neighborhood was quiet; it looked the same as always: people coming and going from the shops, children at play, the soldiers on the corner.

She spoke in a low voice to Ellen’s mother. “They must be edgy because of the latest Resistance incidents. Did you read in De Frie Danske about the bombings in Hillerød and Nørrebro?”

Although she pretended to be absorbed in unpacking her schoolbooks, Annemarie listened, and she knew what her mother was referring to. De Frie Danske – The Free Danes – was an illegal newspaper; Peter Neilsen brought it to them occasionally, carefully folded and hidden among ordinary books and papers, and Mama always burned it after she and Papa had read it. But Annemarie heard Mama and Papa talk, sometimes at night, about the news they received that way: news of sabotage against the Nazis, bombs hidden and exploded in the factories that produced war materials, and industrial railroad lines damaged so that the goods couldn’t be transported.

And she knew what Resistance meant. Papa had explained, when she overheard the word and asked. The Resistance fighters were Danish people – no one knew who, because they were very secret – who were determined to bring harm to the Nazis however they could. They damaged the German trucks and cars, and bombed their factories. They were very brave. Sometimes they were caught and killed.

“I must go and speak to Ellen,” Mrs. Rosen said, moving toward the door. “You girls walk a different way to school tomorrow. Promise me, Annemarie. And Ellen will promise, too.”

“We will, Mrs. Rosen. But what does it matter? There are German soldiers on every corner.”

“They will remember your faces,” Mrs. Rosen said, turning in the doorway to the hall. “It is important to be one of the crowd, always. Be one of many. Be sure that they never have reason to remember your face.” She disappeared into the hall and closed the door behind her.

“He’ll remember my face, Mama,” Kirsti announced happily, “because he said I look like his little girl. He said I was pretty.”

“If he has such a pretty little girl, why doesn’t he go back to her like a good father?” Mrs. Johansen murmured, stroking Kirsti’s cheek. “Why doesn’t he go back to his own country?”

“Mama, is there anything to eat?” Annemarie asked, hoping to take her mother’s mind away from the soldiers.

“Take some bread. And give a piece to your sister.”

“With butter?” Kirsti asked hopefully.

“No butter,” her mother replied. “You know that.”

Kirsti sighed as Annemarie went to the breadbox in the kitchen. “I wish I could have a cupcake,” she said. “A big yellow cupcake, with pink frosting.”

Her mother laughed. “For a little girl, you have a long memory,” she told Kirsti. “There hasn’t been any butter, or sugar for cupcakes, for a long time. A year, at least.”

“When will there be cupcakes again?”

“When the war ends,” Mrs. Johansen said. She glanced through the window, down to the street corner where the soldiers stood, their faces impassive beneath the metal helmets. “When the soldiers leave.”

2 Who Is the Man Who Rides Past?

“Tell me a story, Annemarie,” begged Kirsti as she snuggled beside her sister in the big bed they shared. “Tell me a fairy tale.”

Annemarie smiled and wrapped her arms around her little sister in the dark. All Danish children grew up familiar with fairy tales. Hans Christian Andersen, the most famous of the tale tellers, had been Danish himself.

“Do you want the one about the little mermaid?” That one had always been Annemarie’s own favorite.

But Kirsti said no. “Tell one that starts with a king and a queen. And they have a beautiful daughter.”

“All right. Once upon a time there was a king,” Annemarie began.

“And a queen,” whispered Kirsti. “Don’t forget the queen.”

“And a queen. They lived together in a wonderful palace, and— ”

“Was the palace named Amalienborg?” Kirsti asked sleepily.

“Shhh. Don’t keep interrupting or I’ll never finish the story. No, it wasn’t Amalienborg. It was a pretend palace.”

Annemarie talked on, making up a story of a king and queen and their beautiful daughter, Princess Kirsten; she sprinkled her tale with formal balls, fabulous gold-trimmed gowns, and feasts of pink-frosted cupcakes, until Kirsti’s deep, even breathing told her that her sister was sound asleep.

She stopped, waited for a moment, half expecting Kirsti to murmur “Then what happened?” But Kirsti was still. Annemarie’s thoughts turned to the real king, Christian X, and the real palace, Amalienborg, where he lived, in the center of Copenhagen.

How the people of Denmark loved King Christian! He was not like fairy tale kings, who seemed to stand on balconies giving orders to subjects, or who sat on golden thrones demanding to be entertained and looking for suitable husbands for their daughters. King Christian was a real human being, a man with a serious, kind face. She had seen him often, when she was younger. Each morning, he had come from the palace on his horse, Jubilee, and ridden alone through the streets of Copenhagen, greeting his people. Sometimes, when Annemarie was a little girl, her older sister, Lise, had taken her to stand on the sidewalk so that she could wave to King Christian. Sometimes he had waved back to the two of them, and smiled. “Now you are special forever,” Lise had told her once, “because you have been greeted by a king.”

Annemarie turned her head on the pillow and stared through the partly opened curtains of the window into the dim September night. Thinking of Lise, her solemn, lovely sister, always made her sad.

So she turned her thoughts again to the king, who was still alive, as Lise was not. She remembered a story that Papa had told her, shortly after the war began, shortly after Denmark had surrendered and the soldiers had moved in overnight to take their places on the corners.

One evening, Papa had told her that earlier he was on an errand near his office, standing on the corner waiting to cross the street, when King Christian came by on his morning ride. One of the German soldiers had turned, suddenly, and asked a question of a teenage boy nearby.

“Who is that man who rides past here every morning on his horse?” the German soldier had asked.

Papa said he had smiled to himself, amused that the German soldier did not know. He listened while the boy answered.

“He is our king,” the boy told the soldier. “He is the King of Denmark.”

“Where is his bodyguard?” the soldier had asked.

“And do you know what the boy said?” Papa had asked Annemarie. She was sitting on his lap. She was little, then, only seven years old. She shook her head, waiting to hear the answer.

“The boy looked right at the soldier, and he said, ‘All of Denmark is his bodyguard.’ ”

Annemarie had shivered. It sounded like a very brave answer. “Is it true, Papa?” she asked. “What the boy said?”

Papa thought for a moment. He always considered questions very carefully before he answered them. “Yes,” he said at last. “It is true. Any Danish citizen would die for King Christian, to protect him.”

“You too, Papa?”

“Yes.”

“And Mama?”

“Mama too.”

Annemarie shivered again. “Then I would too, Papa. If I had to.”

They sat silently for a moment. From across the room, Mama watched them, Annemarie and Papa, and she smiled. Mama had been crocheting that evening three years ago: the lacy edging of a pillowcase, part of Lise’s trousseau. Her fingers moved rapidly, turning the thin white thread into an intricate narrow border. Lise was a grownup girl of eighteen, then, about to be married to Peter Neilsen. When Lise and Peter married, Mama said, Annemarie and Kirsti would have a brother for the very first time.

“Papa,” Annemarie had said, finally, into the silence, “sometimes I wonder why the king wasn’t able to protect us. Why didn’t he fight the Nazis so that they wouldn’t come into Denmark with their guns?”

Papa sighed. “We are such a tiny country,” he said. “And they are such an enormous enemy. Our king was wise. He knew how few soldiers Denmark had. He knew that many, many Danish people would die if we fought.”

“In Norway they fought,” Annemarie pointed out.

Papa nodded. “They fought very fiercely in Norway. They had those huge mountains for the Norwegian soldiers to hide in. Even so, Norway was crushed.”

In her mind, Annemarie had pictured Norway as she remembered it from the map at school, up above Denmark. Norway was pink on the school map. She imagined the pink strip of Norway crushed by a fist.

“Are there German soldiers in Norway now, the same as here?”

“Yes,” Papa said.

“In Holland, too,” Mama added from across the room, “and Belgium and France.”

“But not in Sweden!” Annemarie announced, proud that she knew so much about the world. Sweden was blue on the map, and she had seen Sweden, even though she had never been there. Standing behind Uncle Henrik’s house, north of Copenhagen, she had looked across the water – the part of the North Sea that was called the Kattegat – to the land on the other side. “That is Sweden you are seeing,” Uncle Henrik had told her. “You are looking across to another country.”

“That’s true,” Papa had said. “Sweden is still free.”

And now, three years later, it was still true. But much else had changed. King Christian was getting old, and he had been badly injured last year in a fall from his horse, faithful old Jubilee, who had carried him around Copenhagen so many mornings. For days they thought he would die, and all of Denmark had mourned.

But he hadn’t. King Christian X was still alive.

It was Lise who was not. It was her tall, beautiful sister who had died in an accident two weeks before her wedding. In the blue carved trunk in the corner of this bedroom – Annemarie could see its shape even in the dark – were folded Lise’s pillowcases with their crocheted edges, her wedding dress with its hand-embroidered neckline, unworn, and the yellow dress that she had worn and danced in, with its full skirt flying, at the party celebrating her engagement to Peter.

Mama and Papa never spoke of Lise. They never opened the trunk. But Annemarie did, from time to time, when she was alone in the apartment; alone, she touched Lise’s things gently, remembering her quiet, soft-spoken sister who had looked forward so to marriage and children of her own.

Redheaded Peter, her sister’s fiance, had not married anyone in the years since Lise’s death. He had changed a great deal. Once he had been like a fun-loving older brother to Annemarie and Kirsti, teasing and tickling, always a source of foolishness and pranks. Now he still stopped by the apartment often, and his greetings to the girls were warm and smiling, but he was usually in a hurry, talking quickly to Mama and Papa about things Annemarie didn’t understand. He no longer sang the nonsense songs that had once made Annemarie and Kirsti shriek with laughter. And he never lingered anymore.

Papa had changed, too. He seemed much older and very tired, defeated.

The whole world had changed. Only the fairy tales remained the same.

“And they lived happily ever after,” Annemarie recited, whispering into the dark, completing the tale for her sister, who slept beside her, one thumb in her mouth.

3 Where Is Mrs. Hirsch?

The days of September passed, one after the other, much the same. Annemarie and Ellen walked to school together, and home again, always now taking the longer way, avoiding the tall soldier and his partner. Kirsti dawdled just behind them or scampered ahead, never out of their sight.

The two mothers still had their “coffee” together in the afternoons. They began to knit mittens as the days grew slightly shorter and the first leaves began to fall from the trees, because another winter was coming. Everyone remembered the last one. There was no fuel now for the homes and apartments in Copenhagen, and the winter nights were terribly cold.

Like the other families in their building, the Johansens had opened the old chimney and installed a little stove to use for heat when they could find coal to burn. Mama used it too, sometimes, for cooking, because electricity was rationed now. At night they used candles for light. Sometimes Ellen’s father, a teacher, complained in frustration because he couldn’t see in the dim light to correct his students’ papers.

“Soon we will have to add another blanket to your bed,” Mama said one morning as she and Annemarie tidied the bedroom.

“Kirsti and I are lucky to have each other for warmth in the winter,” Annemarie said. “Poor Ellen, to have no sisters.”

“She will have to snuggle in with her mama and papa when it gets cold,” Mama said, smiling.

“I remember when Kirsti slept between you and Papa. She was supposed to stay in her crib, but in the middle of the night she would climb out and get in with you,” Annemarie said, smoothing the pillows on the bed. Then she hesitated and glanced at her mother, fearful that she had said the wrong thing, the thing that would bring the pained look to her mother’s face. The days when little Kirsti slept in Mama and Papa’s room were the days when Lise and Annemarie shared this bed.

But Mama was laughing quietly. “I remember, too,” she said. “Sometimes she wet the bed in the middle of the night!”

“I did not!” Kirsti said haughtily from the bedroom doorway. “I never, ever did that!”

Mama, still laughing, knelt and kissed Kirsti on the cheek. “Time to leave for school, girls,” she said. She began to button Kirsti’s jacket. “Oh, dear,” she said, suddenly. “Look. This button has broken right in half. Annemarie, take Kirsti with you, after school, to the little shop where Mrs. Hirsch sells thread and buttons. See if you can buy just one, to match the others on her jacket. I’ll give you some kroner – it shouldn’t cost very much.”

But after school, when the girls stopped at the shop, which had been there as long as Annemarie could remember, they found it closed. There was a new padlock on the door, and a sign. But the sign was in German. They couldn’t read the words.

“I wonder if Mrs. Hirsch is sick,” Annemarie said as they walked away.

“I saw her Saturday,” Ellen said. “She was with her husband and their son. They all looked just fine. Or at least the parents looked just fine – the son always looks like a horror.” She giggled.

Annemarie made a face. The Hirsch family lived in the neighborhood, so they had seen the boy, Samuel, often. He was a tall teenager with thick glasses, stooped shoulders, and unruly hair. He rode a bicycle to school, leaning forward and squinting, wrinkling his nose to nudge his glasses into place. His bicycle had wooden wheels, now that rubber tires weren’t available, and it creaked and clattered on the street.

“I think the Hirsches all went on a vacation to the seashore,” Kirsti announced.

“And I suppose they took a big basket of pink-frosted cupcakes with them,” Annemarie said sarcastically to her sister.

“Yes, I suppose they did,” Kirsti replied.

Annemarie and Ellen exchanged looks that meant: Kirsti is so dumb. No one in Copenhagen had taken a vacation at the seashore since the war began. There were no pink-frosted cupcakes; there hadn’t been for months.

Still, Annemarie thought, looking back at the shop before they turned the corner, where was Mrs. Hirsch? The Hirsch family had gone somewhere. Why else would they close the shop?

Mama was troubled when she heard the news. “Are you sure?” she asked several times.

“We can find another button someplace,” Annemarie reassured her. “Or we can take one from the bottom of the jacket and move it up. It won’t show very much.”

But it didn’t seem to be the jacket that worried Mama. “Are you sure the sign was in German?” she asked. “Maybe you didn’t look carefully.”

“Mama, it had a swastika on it.”

Her mother turned away with a distracted look. “Annemarie, watch your sister for a few moments. And begin to peel the potatoes for dinner. I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?” Annemarie asked as her mother started for the door.

“I want to talk to Mrs. Rosen.”

Puzzled, Annemarie watched her mother leave the apartment. She went to the kitchen and opened the door to the cupboard where the potatoes were kept. Every night, now, it seemed, they had potatoes for dinner. And very little else.

Annemarie was almost asleep when there was a light knock on the bedroom door. Candlelight appeared as the door opened, and her mother stepped in.

“Are you asleep, Annemarie?”

“No. Why? Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. But I’d like you to get up and come out to the living room. Peter’s here. Papa and I want to talk to you.”

Annemarie jumped out of bed, and Kirsti grunted in her sleep. Peter! She hadn’t seen him in a long time. There was something frightening about his being here at night. Copenhagen had a curfew, and no citizens were allowed out after eight o’clock. It was very dangerous, she knew, for Peter to visit at this time. But she was delighted that he was here. Though his visits were always hurried – they almost seemed secret, somehow, in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on – still, it was a treat to see Peter. It brought back memories of happier times. And her parents loved Peter, too. They said he was like a son.

Barefoot, she ran to the living room and into Peter’s arms. He grinned, kissed her cheek, and ruffled her long hair.

“You’ve grown taller since I saw you last,” he told her. “You’re all legs!”

Annemarie laughed. “I won the girls’ footrace last Friday at school,” she told him proudly. “Where have you been? We’ve missed you!”

“My work takes me all over,” Peter explained. “Look, I brought you something. One for Kirsti, too.” He reached into his pocket and handed her two seashells.

Annemarie put the smaller one on the table to save it for her sister. She held the other in her hands, turning it in the light, looking at the ridged, pearly surface. It was so like Peter, to bring just the right gift.

“For your mama and papa, I brought something more practical. Two bottles of beer!”

Mama and Papa smiled and raised their glasses. Papa took a sip and wiped the foam from his upper lip. Then his face became more serious.

“Annemarie,” he said, “Peter tells us that the Germans have issued orders closing many stores run by Jews.”

“Jews?” Annemarie repeated. “Is Mrs. Hirsch Jewish? Is that why the button shop is closed? Why have they done that?”

Peter leaned forward. “It is their way of tormenting. For some reason, they want to torment Jewish people. It has happened in the other countries. They have taken their time here – have let us relax a little. But now it seems to be starting.”

“But why the button shop? What harm is a button shop? Mrs. Hirsch is such a nice lady. Even Samuel – he’s a dope, but he would never harm anyone. How could he – he can’t even see, with his thick glasses!”

Then Annemarie thought of something else. “If they can’t sell their buttons, how will they earn a living?”

“Friends will take care of them,” Mama said gently. “That’s what friends do.”

Annemarie nodded. Mama was right, of course. Friends and neighbors would go to the home of the Hirsch family, would take them fish and potatoes and bread and herbs for making tea. Maybe Peter would even take them a beer. They would be comfortable until their shop was allowed to open again.

Then, suddenly, she sat upright, her eyes wide. “Mama!” she said. “Papa! The Rosens are Jewish, too!”

Her parents nodded, their faces serious and drawn. “I talked to Sophy Rosen this afternoon, after you told me about the button shop,” Mama said. “She knows what is happening. But she doesn’t think that it will affect them.”

Annemarie thought, and understood. She relaxed. “Mr. Rosen doesn’t have a shop. He’s a teacher. They can’t close a whole school!” She looked at Peter with the question in her eyes. “Can they?”

“I think the Rosens will be all right,” he said. “But you keep an eye on your friend Ellen. And stay away from the soldiers. Your mother told me about what happened on Østerbrogade.”

Annemarie shrugged. She had almost forgotten the incident. “It was nothing. They were only bored and looking for someone to talk to, I think.”

She turned to her father. “Papa, do you remember what you heard the boy say to the soldier? That all of Denmark would be the king’s bodyguard?”

Her father smiled. “I have never forgotten it,” he said.

“Well,” Annemarie said slowly, “now I think that all of Denmark must be bodyguard for the Jews, as well.”

“So we shall be,” Papa replied.

Peter stood. “I must go,” he said. “And you, Longlegs, it is way past your bedtime now.” He hugged Annemarie again.

Later, once more in her bed beside the warm cocoon of her sister, Annemarie remembered how her father had said, three years before, that he would die to protect the king. That her mother would, too. And Annemarie, seven years old, had announced proudly that she also would.

Now she was ten, with long legs and no more silly dreams of pink-frosted cupcakes. And now she – and all the Danes – were to be bodyguard for Ellen, and Ellen’s parents, and all of Denmark’s Jews.

Would she die to protect them? Truly? Annemarie was honest enough to admit, there in the darkness, to herself, that she wasn’t sure.

For a moment she felt frightened. But she pulled the blanket up higher around her neck and relaxed. It was all imaginary, anyway – not real. It was only in the fairy tales that people were called upon to be so brave, to die for one another. Not in real-life Denmark. Oh, there were the soldiers; that was true. And the courageous Resistance leaders, who sometimes lost their lives; that was true, too.

But ordinary people like the Rosens and the Johansens? Annemarie admitted to herself, snuggling there in the quiet dark, that she was glad to be an ordinary person who would never be called upon for courage.

4 It Will Be a Long Night

Alone in the apartment while Mama was out shopping with Kirsti, Annemarie and Ellen were sprawled on the living room floor playing with paper dolls. They had cut the dolls from Mama’s magazines, old ones she had saved from past years. The paper ladies had old-fashioned hair styles and clothes, and the girls had given them names from Mama’s very favorite book. Mama had told Annemarie and Ellen the entire story of Gone With the Wind, and the girls thought it much more interesting and romantic than the king-and-queen tales that Kirsti loved.

“Come, Melanie,” Annemarie said, walking her doll across the edge of the rug. “Let’s dress for the ball.”

“All right, Scarlett, I’m coming,” Ellen replied in a sophisticated voice. She was a talented performer; she often played the leading roles in school dramatics. Games of the imagination were always fun when Ellen played.

The door opened and Kirsti stomped in, her face tear-stained and glowering. Mama followed her with an exasperated look and set a package down on the table.

“I won’t!” Kirsti sputtered. “I won’t ever, ever wear them! Not if you chain me in a prison and beat me with sticks!”

Annemarie giggled and looked questioningly at her mother. Mrs. Johansen sighed. “I bought Kirsti some new shoes,” she explained. “She’s outgrown her old ones.”

“Goodness, Kirsti,” Ellen said, “I wish my mother would get me some new shoes. I love new things, and it’s so hard to find them in the stores.”

“Not if you go to a fish store!” Kirsti bellowed. “But most mothers wouldn’t make their daughters wear ugly fish shoes!”

“Kirsten,” Mama said soothingly, “you know it wasn’t a fish store. And we were lucky to find shoes at all.”

Kirsti sniffed. “Show them,” she commanded. “Show Annemarie and Ellen how ugly they are.”

Mama opened the package and took out a pair of little girl’s shoes. She held them up, and Kirsti looked away in disgust.

“You know there’s no leather anymore,” Mama explained. “But they’ve found a way to make shoes out of fish skin. I don’t think these are too ugly.”

Annemarie and Ellen looked at the fish skin shoes. Annemarie took one in her hand and examined it. It was odd-looking; the fish scales were visible. But it was a shoe, and her sister needed shoes.

“It’s not so bad, Kirsti,” she said, lying a little.

Ellen turned the other one over in her hand. “You know,” she said, “it’s only the color that’s ugly.”

“Green!” Kirsti wailed. “I will never, ever wear green shoes!”

“In our apartment,” Ellen told her, “my father has a jar of black, black ink. Would you like these shoes better if they were black?”

Kirsti frowned. “Maybe I would,” she said, finally.

“Well, then,” Ellen told her, “tonight, if your mama doesn’t mind, I’ll take the shoes home and ask my father to make them black for you, with his ink.”

Mama laughed. “I think that would be a fine improvement. What do you think, Kirsti?”

Kirsti pondered. “Could he make them shiny?” she asked. “I want them shiny.”

Ellen nodded. “I think he could. I think they’ll be quite pretty, black and shiny.”

Kirsti nodded. “All right, then,” she said. “But you mustn’t tell anyone that they’re fish. I don’t want anyone to know.” She took her new shoes, holding them disdainfully, and put them on a chair. Then she looked with interest at the paper dolls.

“Can I play, too?” Kirsti asked. “Can I have a doll?” She squatted beside Annemarie and Ellen on the floor.

Sometimes, Annemarie thought, Kirsti was such a pest, always butting in. But the apartment was small. There was no other place for Kirsti to play. And if they told her to go away, Mama would scold.

“Here,” Annemarie said, and handed her sister a cut-out little girl doll. “We’re playing Gone With the Wind. Melanie and Scarlett are going to a ball. You can be Bonnie. She’s Scarlett’s daughter.”

Kirsti danced her doll up and down happily. “I’m going to the ball!” she announced in a high, pretend voice.

Ellen giggled. “A little girl wouldn’t go to a ball. Let’s make them go someplace else. Let’s make them go to Tivoli!”

“Tivoli!” Annemarie began to laugh. “That’s in Copenhagen! Gone With the Wind is in America!”

“Tivoli, Tivoli, Tivoli,” little Kirsti sang, twirling her doll in a circle.

“It doesn’t matter, because it’s only a game anyway,” Ellen pointed out. “Tivoli can be over there, by that chair. ‘Come, Scarlett,’ ” she said, using her doll voice, “ ‘we shall go to Tivoli to dance and watch the fireworks, and maybe there will be some handsome men there! Bring your silly daughter Bonnie, and she can ride on the carousel.’ ”

Annemarie grinned and walked her Scarlett toward the chair that Ellen had designated as Tivoli. She loved Tivoli Gardens, in the heart of Copenhagen; her parents had taken her there, often, when she was a little girl. She remembered the music and the brightly colored lights, the carousel and ice cream and especially the magnificent fireworks in the evenings: the huge colored splashes and bursts of lights in the evening sky.

“I remember the fireworks best of all,” she commented to Ellen.

“Me too,” Kirsti said. “I remember the fireworks.”

“Silly,” Annemarie scoffed. “You never saw the fireworks.” Tivoli Gardens was closed now. The German occupation forces had burned part of it, perhaps as a way of punishing the fun-loving Danes for their lighthearted pleasures.

Kirsti drew herself up, her small shoulders stiff. “I did too,” she said belligerently. “It was my birthday. I woke up in the night and I could hear the booms. And there were lights in the sky. Mama said it was fireworks for my birthday!”

Then Annemarie remembered. Kirsti’s birthday was late in August. And that night, only a month before, she, too, had been awakened and frightened by the sound of explosions. Kirsti was right – the sky in the southeast had been ablaze, and Mama had comforted her by calling it a birthday celebration. “Imagine, such fireworks for a little girl five years old!” Mama had said, sitting on their bed, holding the dark curtain aside to look through the window at the lighted sky.

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