Number the Stars — Chapter 8

About This Passage

This is one of Lowry's most carefully built sentences in chapter eight. The trailblazer should pause to notice how it works. Lowry takes a single bright morning at Henrik's farmhouse — the cream, the bird, the apple tree, the silver fish out on the strait — and uses ALL of it to push the soldiers, just for a moment, out of the room. Notice the word 'specter' — a word for a ghost. The Nazi soldiers, who only yesterday banged on doors in Copenhagen, are reduced (just for one breakfast) to a 'ghost story' you would tell to scare a child in the dark. This is what Lowry does to comfort the reader and to remind us why this family is fighting: there is a real world, full of cream and birds and shiny fish, and the soldiers do not get to own it. Copying this passage trains the trailblazer to notice that beauty itself is a kind of resistance.

Narration Prompt

Retell chapter eight in your own words. Begin with the warm farmhouse morning — Henrik leaving for the barn before dawn, the gray kitten now named Thor, oatmeal with real cream, and the joke about soldiers 'relocating' the farmers' butter. Tell about Mama scrubbing the house all day, beating the rugs, and the girls picking armfuls of dried wildflowers and arranging them in every pitcher. Move to the afternoon, when Uncle Henrik comes home and tells Mama, 'Tomorrow will be a day for fishing' — a phrase Annemarie remembers from Papa's coded phone call. Then come to the chapter's secret center: Henrik tells the girls there has been a death — Great-aunt Birte will rest in the living room tonight in her casket, before being buried tomorrow. End with the chapter's quiet, devastating last line: Annemarie, who knows every name in her mother's family stories by heart, is quite certain there is no Great-aunt Birte. There never was.

Discussion Questions

1. Mama and the girls laugh together at the picture of 'a mound of frightened butter under military arrest.' Lowry then writes that 'suddenly the specter of guns and grim-faced soldiers seemed nothing more than a ghost story.' What in the story tells you that laughter and beauty can push fear, even briefly, out of a room? How do you know the family is using ordinary joys as a way to keep their courage alive?
2. Kirsti has named the gray kitten Thor, after the Norse God of Thunder. Annemarie laughs because the kitten is small and gentle and would 'run and hide if there were a thunderstorm.' What in the story tells you Kirsti likes giving small, soft creatures big, brave names? How do you know that Lowry is using a kitten with a too-big name to tell us something gentle about how children meet a scary world?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide