This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer. Welcome to Fortress Fiction episode 13. Join me as I talk about
Number the Stars by Lois Lowry. This book was published in 1989.
The synopsis is this, in Nazi occupied Denmark in 1943, ten-year-old Anne Marie helped shelter her Jewish friend from the Nazis.
So this
first question to address is
does this book belong in a place of honor in the fortress fiction? I kind of waffled back and forth.
I was gonna say no, but it's a very good book and I suggest people read it. But after thinking about it more, I say yes.
This book does belong in the fortress fiction and I will talk a bit more about that later.
So I'll explain my reasoning for that and we can have a discussion about it. So
the ways that you can read this book are as follows. You can borrow it free from cloud library.
It's an audiobook format there. I didn't check if there's an ebook or not, but you can certainly get a book
rented from your, checked out from your library for free.
As well as purchased on the publisher's website, which it looks like Scholastic is the current publisher.
And there's other online retailers where you can get it in audiobook format or paperback or whatever as well.
Kobo and Audible, for example, are linked in the show notes.
I also have the author's website, Lois Lowry's website, linked in the show notes. I don't know
because of how, maybe perhaps the way she's publishing things or what.
It doesn't look like there's links to directly buy from her website, but it has information about the books on her website.
So that's interesting.
And then I want to let you know some, just some, of the other books that she's written. Not all of them because
there's a lot. Like I don't even, looking at it, there's just a lot. So
couple dozen probably. Maybe 36, more than that. I don't know. Anyway,
you can check that out on her website or check it out in the wiki, which I have sourced in the show notes as well.
But these are her children's books. There's The Giver Quartet, which is The Giver, Gathering Blue, Messenger, and Son,
which was published eight years after its previous book, which
yeah, interesting. Then there's this Anastasia series she has, which has one, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine, I think nine books total. And it started publishing in 1979 and finished publishing in
1995. And then there's the Sam Krupnick series, which is all about Sam, Attaboy Sam, See Around Sam, and
Zooman, Zooman Sam. And those were from 88, 92, 96, 99.
And then there's a series of Tate family books as well that started publishing in 1983,
continued in 1985, and then it looks like they finished in
1990. And there are many more books, like I said.
So you can check out her bibliography linked in the show notes, or you can look on her website and see the different books
she has published there.
So I think now that I've told you where you can read the book, I will go ahead and give you my thoughts about the book and
why it belongs in the fortress fiction. So first of all, the book is very beautifully written.
The audiobook was two hours, 45 minutes or something like that. So pretty short.
And it's not overly flowery,
but it does describe the beauty of nature that's seen and experienced by the characters.
It does a really excellent job of,
I think, maintaining a third-person close perspective is what it does. I don't think it overgoes first-person.
You get to be really close to Anne-Marie. You almost get no personal insight on her Jewish friend,
whose name I don't quite remember at the moment.
Whoops.
But it's mostly Anne-Marie's experience and her family's experience and learning about what her family's been through and what the Free Danes are doing,
what the Danish Underground, who's fighting against Nazis, is doing. That's what a lot of it's about.
So first of all, the prose is very good. It's excellently written.
There were moments in the book where there were these moments of tension where the girls were encountering these Nazi soldiers who had been occupying their land for,
I think, two years at this point. And I think the Nazi occupation continued for two or three years after the events of this book, so it was a four to five-year period total.
Anyway, those scenes where the Nazis are talking to the little girls are so tense it almost felt like a thriller or almost even a horror book, just how scary it was.
There's also a lot of tension because there are other encounters with the Nazis.
In people's homes, they're coming in and checking on them late at night, a couple of times, once at four in the morning, once at seven or eight at night.
You get to hear about the historical fact. This is a historical fiction book, right?
You get to hear about the historical fact that there's deprivation of the Danish people.
The Nazis are taking all their butter and all their sugar and maybe even all their flour. I don't know what they're eating, but they're rationing things or even rationing electricity.
So it describes the hardships that they've had to suffer and that they're going under, the Danish people.
And I guess it took a while for them to decide that they were going to round up the Jews or whatever.
And I'll probably get pretty heavy into spoilers on this, but I'm going to try not to. I might let something slip.
But definitely, it's hard recommended. You should definitely read the book.
But I'm trying to talk about the way it's written right now, so I might mention some things.
So it's very tense and it's very scary.
And there's also some very moving and inspiring things in it.
For example, there's a story which at the end of the audiobook version that I have, Lois Lowry wrote something that they included in the book, which is which they include in the audiobook version, which is describing the truth of the story.
The particular characters in it are fictional, but there were the Free Danes, the Danish Underground, who did all these different things.
And they're basically all the events that she describes could have happened and did happen with some people, but it wasn't these specific people.
These characters are characters that she made up, not particular historical figures, but they're analogous to them.
And that's very fascinating. So learn a lot about it. And I'm kind of going to spoil some of that, which would be that the and this is these inspiring parts that I want to talk about, which is that like, apparently, King Christian of Denmark had no bodyguards or no royal guard that rode with him as he went out on his horse every morning to ride around his land.
And it's reported, it's recorded that there was this boy who a Nazi soldier asked, you know, who is this man and why is he ride alone? He figured out he's the king. Why is he ride alone? Because all the Danish people are his bodyguard.
I think the guard then asked him, you know, would you be willing to die for the king? And the boy said, yes, I would. And so would all the Danes. And that's a story that Anne Marie's father tells her, and it gets contextualized as being about the Jews now that her and her family, at least, are willing to do the same thing for the Jews of Denmark that people were willing to do for the King of Denmark.
So there's this nationalism, this nationalistic pride that the Danes have, where they hold themselves to be separate people. They're, you know, white people, they're European people, they hold themselves to be separate people from the Germans, from the Nazis, and they believe so much in their nation and in their king, their Christian king, and their, you know, Christian country, that the morality of their kingdom and the morality of them as a people, their culture, is such that they
believe that it compels them to risk their lives, not only for their king, not only for their country, but also for the Jews there. And it turns out that they sabotage, not only did the Friedeans sabotage much things but the king himself sabotaged and destroyed all his ships, so that the Nazis couldn't commandeer his navy and use it in their war effort.
And that's how adamantly he wanted to oppose them, and that's how much he wanted to fight against them in whatever way he could. And that's impressive and that's moving, and it's kind of astonishing, frankly.
And, I don't know, like, it made me really proud of the Danish people at that time and like what they did, and how their like national identity inspired them to have the strength to do these things and how he was fighting to keep his people separate from these other people, from the Germans, the Nazis specifically, but like he saw the Jews of his country and so did other Danes, many, but I don't know, it was, I don't know if it was 100%, I don't know if it was 1%, had to be somewhere in between there.
But, these Danes saw the Jews as co-equal members of their kingdom, of their country, of their people, and therefore they chose to protect them. And what happened was, most of the Jews actually fled from Denmark, and were smuggled out by Danes in this resistance movement.
And it started on the Jewish New Year Rosh Hashanah, which is the time this recording is coming up, not too long, maybe about a month. I haven't checked my calendar to verify but it's coming up, and they were warned by the Nazis, the Nazis went around to the synagogues and asked the rabbis, the Rebonim, you know, what, like, give me the roles, give me the list of all the people who belong to your children, to your synagogue, and I need it, you know, we need this for whatever reason, whatever Nazi reason they gave.
And they gave it to them because they had to, or they felt they had to, and then they warned them to flee, and some Jews didn't believe it, and some Jews did, a lot of Jews did, and most of them actually ended up getting sent across whatever the body of water is there, I don't know what it's called, over to Switzerland, which was neutral.
And they were able to be saved because Germany wanted to, Nazi Germany wanted to leave Switzerland alone for some political, you know, 40 chest reason that I don't understand, I don't know what it is, I don't know the history of that, but that's a fact.
And it's fascinating because, so you have to excuse me and my enthusiasm to talk about how well written the book is, I kind of veered off into like historical fact about the book, and really I think that historical fact makes the book fundamental to the fortress fiction.
The political reality right now is that the nation of Israel has been under attack for a long time. It is currently August 18th, and it's August 18 2024.
And that's a long time.
So yeah, if we look at this, it's been 10 months since October 7, it's been 316, it's been 45 weeks, 316 days, 7583 hours since people who were hanging out at a party, having a festival, were kidnapped by terrorist extremists who took them.
And I think that there were civilians, a lot of civilians, along with I guess military terrorist people who took them and have been holding them. And I don't even know how many, how many captives are still, let me see how many Israeli captives
are
there.
Let's see, BBC, you can always trust them, right? Hamas hostages, let's see.
There's a wiki article as well saying 250 people.
Let's see what this will be a total of 116 hostages remain unaccounted for after being kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 last year. This is from the BBC, this is of July 1, 2024.
So, that's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. That's apparently, it was, as of July 24 even, 116 hostages had been returned alive to Israel with 105 being released in a prisoner exchange.
Let's see, what else does this say?
Originally there were 250 people abducted. So 250 minus 116, 137.
So, one source says there's probably 137 people still being held right now. Another source says there's still 116 hostages so we'll go with the lower number to be more conservative because it's always important to be conservative about things like this.
But yeah, so it's been a long time, and there are still Jews and non-Jews actually, just people who were born in Israel or visiting Israel or whatever, in different countries even, who are being held.
And it's an interesting scenario because in the case of Number of the Stars, you have the Christian Danes who are protecting Jews from the Nazis who want to attack and kill them. And that was something that happened in real life.
And in real life now, present in the state of Israel, the so-called Palestinians went ahead and abducted 200 normal citizens, stepped up and joined the fight to abduct 251 people who, well not to mention all the people that were murdered and tortured to death and women who were assaulted in different ways on that day.
And it's just kind of an interesting contrast between the citizens of Denmark at the time and the citizens of so-called Palestine at this time.
And, that's really interesting isn't it? It's interesting and it's interesting contrast. And I know some people will like what I'm saying, it'll be, I'll be helping them with their confirmation bias and some people will hate what I'm saying and they'll think that I'm being a hate monger
and a sympathizer of whatever and they'll have all sorts of reasons to attack me for saying this but these people from the 40s who were Christians and had reasons to not like the Jews, put themselves at risk to defend these Jews.
And then these people in the 2000s where as time has gone on we're supposed to be better and stronger and smarter and more advanced and more moral and more woke and more with it, more hip to what's right and what's wrong, went ahead and instead of defending innocent lives they ended innocent lives.
And they, instead of freeing people who were going to be captives they took captives into their homes and guarded them with their families alongside them for months, for almost a year.
And it's sick and it's sad and if you could be shamed, or if you could be proud to be a Dane or if I could feel pride over what the Danes have done, then I can certainly feel shame and embarrassment on behalf of the so called Palestinians and what they've decided to do.
And it's an interesting contrast I think this belongs in the fortress fiction because it contextualizes and it shows things in such a way that you can recognize and see that despite the fact that Anne Marie and her family are Christian, and despite the fact that whatever
her friends name, who's Jewish, her family are Jewish and they have differences from each other.
The families coexist together, the mothers were friends, and had coffee together every day for a long time, and they appreciated each other, and they respect each other's cultures and their differences.
And that's something that's possible to do. You can disagree with people about certain things fundamental things in your life things that are important to you, and yet you can still be friends with them.
You can still have a life with them, and you can support them and help them, and you can work together to accomplish things.
And I think that's fundamental to building life, that's fundamental to being good people who build and create and form bonds and
build a future for the world, as opposed to being people who destroy and tear down and put people in bonds and destroy the future for themselves for their children, and for random, innocent people.
And, yeah, I really wasn't sure at first, you know, it was a good book, but was it really fortress fiction material and I think it is because it's willing to say that certain people.
That all people really deserve to be left alone, that all people deserve the right of self determination, and that all people deserve to be protected, especially when they're innocent people being harmed by non-incident people.
By hateful people who seek to destroy those who stand in their way.
So yeah, that's my controversial stance, I guess you could say, on this Holocaust book, on this Holocaust Tangential book.
And, yeah, that's pretty much all I have to say. So anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and start a conversation about this.
And I think that's going to be it for now. So this is a hard recommend. I definitely suggest you get it.
316 days, 365 days is a year, so in less than 40 days, it'll have been more than a year since 251 people were taken captive and 116 of them are still yet to be released.
We would need to have two or three released every day for the next 40 some days in order for the rest of them to be released before that year is up.
And I think it's reasonable. Anyway, I need to stop talking about that. The book is great. I think the book is very moral.
It talks about bravery in the face of fear and what bravery means, and talks about how to make a moral stand. And for those things, I laud the book.
Aside from it just being a really good story and a very well written book, the prose was excellent.
That's all. So until next time, folks, take care and keep reading.