“But I had never heard it before in such a riveting, personal way.” With Annelise’s permission, Lowry created Annemarie. The real-life Annelise was frightened by the occupation and the events she witnessed during the war. “I suppose I had heard the story before, of the way the Danes smuggled their Jewish population to Sweden in 1943,” Lowry writes. Annelise spoke compellingly about her fear during air raids and frozen winters-and her terror of the Nazis who occupied her country and controlled its citizens’ lives. There, on a 1988 vacation, Lowry talked to her friend Annelise about her childhood experiences in wartime Denmark. Though the book takes place in 1940s Denmark, where protagonist Annemarie helps the Danish Resistance hide and smuggle Danish Jews to safety in Sweden, it started in Bermuda. Lois Lowry’s 1989 novel Number the Stars, didn’t just win a prestigious Newbery Medal and make you cry as you wrote your book report-it was also based on a true story, as Lowry told The Reading Teacher in 1990.
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