Number the Stars — Chapter 3

About This Passage

This is the closing paragraph of chapter three and one of the most ironic passages in the novel. Annemarie has just admitted she does not know if she could die to protect her friend Ellen — and then she comforts herself by deciding the question is imaginary, that ordinary people in real-life Denmark are never called upon for courage. The reader knows otherwise. Lois Lowry is using free indirect discourse and dramatic irony to do something very precise: she is letting Annemarie believe one thing while letting the reader feel the truth that is about to test her. The pathfinder copying this passage should attend to how a reassurance can also be foreshadowing — and how Lowry concedes the soldiers and the Resistance leaders before isolating 'ordinary people' as the safe category. That isolation is the very category that the rest of the book will dismantle.

Narration Prompt

Retell chapter three in your own words. Walk through how news reaches Annemarie in stages: the broken button on Kirsti's jacket; the closed button shop with its German sign and swastika; Mama's quiet, hurried walk to Mrs. Rosen's apartment; Peter's risky after-curfew arrival with seashells, beer, and grave news; the realization that the Hirsches and the Rosens are Jewish; Annemarie's extension of 'All of Denmark is his bodyguard' to include Denmark's Jews; and her private, honest admission alone in bed that she does not know if she could really die to protect Ellen.

Discussion Questions

1. Lois Lowry sequences chapter three so that the reader learns of the Jewish persecution exactly as Annemarie does — first the closed shop, then Mama's hurried visit to Mrs. Rosen, then Peter's after-curfew arrival, then the spoken news. What is the effect of staging the revelation in this order? How would the chapter feel different if Peter had told Annemarie the news on page one?
2. When Annemarie tells her father, 'Now I think that all of Denmark must be bodyguard for the Jews, as well,' Papa simply replies, 'So we shall be.' What does it mean that the ten-year-old reaches this moral conclusion before the adults verbalize it? Is Lowry making a claim about how conscience develops, and if so, what is she claiming?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide