In the novel "Number the Stars", Annemarie's dad explains that the Germans "plan to arrest all the Danish Jews" and "to take them away." He doesn't know where and he really doesn't know why, at least that's what he tells Annemarie.

Lois Lowry doesn't explain what is really happening to the Jews in Denmark. But, the sense of urgency in getting them to safety is enough to tell her readers that it must be very serious. The history behind the story is the subject of this passage.

In her Newbery Award winning novel Number the Stars, author Lois Lowry tells the story of how the Danish Resistance smuggled Jews from Nazi occupied Denmark to neutral Sweden during World War II. An example of historical fiction based on the stories of a life-long friend who had experienced the plight of the Jews during World War II, Number the Stars is a suspenseful tale of how friendship between two young girls and the bravery of their families and friends saved the lives of a Danish Jewish family. Thanks to the efforts of countless people across Europe, many other Jewish families were smuggled to safety or were hidden in homes and church properties until Germany's surrender and the end of the war.

For many more Jewish families in Europe, however, the ordeals did not end so happily. This passage, written for my fifth graders, is a brief history of the struggles of the Jews at the hands of Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Image Caption:  This Yearling Newbery cover of Louis Lowry's novel Number the Stars shows a picture of Anne Johnson, chosen by Lowry to represent her character Annemarie Johansen. Beside her is a Star of David necklace, probably a lasting symbol of friendship between Annemarie and Ellen Rosen, the only child of the Jewish family the Johansen's smuggled to the safety of Sweden.

Adolf Hitler's rise to power, began in 1919, after the defeat of Germany in World War I. In his prison cell, he wrote a book that would form the blueprint for his destructive plans to conquer the world and rid it of people he considered inferior. Even then, he had a strong hatred of the Jews who he blamed for Germany's defeat in the first world war.

By 1933, Hitler and his ruling Nazi Party had gained complete control of Germany. One of his first acts as leader was to construct six concentration camps. He planned to use them as prisons for German Jews and other people he disliked.

On November 9, 1938 the arrest of German Jews began and so did Hitler's deliberate acts to exterminate all Jews from the face of the earth. Unfortunately, he had convinced many other Germans of his beliefs and they became willing, and sometimes unwilling, participants in his madness. Despite objections from countries around the world, Hitler carried out his plan. It wasn't until near the end of the war when the Allies finally reached many of the camps that the true nature of his plan became known.

Image Caption:  In this image, Adolf Hitler is giving one of his famous firey speeches. These speeches were given with such conviction, many Germans blindly followed him and became willing participants in his insane plans.

Within the first seven years of his rule, Hitler had rebuilt the German army to the largest fighting force in Europe. On September 1, 1939, his armies invaded Poland. Two days later on September 3, Britain and its allies declared war on Germany. World War II had begun. A conflict that began in Europe would eventually spread world-wide.

Within months Hitler invaded many other of Germany's neighbours including Denmark, Norway and France. In Poland and Austria, he isolated the Jews from their fellow citizens by placing them in ghettos, the run-down sections of the larger cities. Throughout German occupied Europe, Jews were also ordered to wear the golden coloured six-pointed Star of David to identify them as Jews. For no reason other than who they were, Jews lost their jobs, businesses, homes and all their earthly possessions. Practicing their religion was forbidden and Jewish schools were closed. The few children who were able to attend other schools were now being ridiculed by classmates and teachers who were once their friends. The madness he had started in Germany was now happening across all of Nazi occupied Europe.

Image Caption:  This image shows Jews being used as slave labour in the construction of a wall around a ghetto; the run-down section of a city where the Jews were held to separate them from the general population. Many Jews were shipped to work camps and death camps from these ghettos.

As Hitler's plan unfolded, mass arrests of Jews were ordered. Men, women and children of all ages were herded into town squares and railway yards in cities throughout Europe. Wives were separated from their husbands and children from their parents. Adults with a trade and in good physical health were taken to work camps where they were forced to work as slaves to supply the German army with food, clothing, weapons and ammunition.

Adults who were sick or too weak to work were taken to death camps where they were either hanged, shot or gassed to death by the thousands. Their bodies, stripped of clothing, jewelry and even the gold fillings in their teeth, were either dumped and buried in mass graves or cremated in large ovens and open pits. In some cases, whole families were imprisoned together. This did not, however, spare them of the horrible fate Hitler had planned for them all.

Image Caption:  In this picture, children separated from their parents are placed with older people. The Star of David Hitler ordered them to wear as a badge of shame is visible on the coats of a few.

The children arrested by the Germans ranged in age from infants to teenagers. The chances of surviving the death camps was greater for the older children who were considered better able to work. Young mothers were often killed, some still clutching their infant children in a mother's loving embrace.

Many school-aged children suffered the same fate as the sick and elderly. Some were spared the death camps, but their fate was just as horrible. They were used as subjects in all kinds of medical experiments. Some were given germs that caused diseases, and once sick, injected with experimental medicines to study how the human body would respond. Even some of the adults did not escape Nazi medical and military experiments. Many children suffered greatly until their deaths. Those that did survive have carried the physical and emotion scars throughout their lives.

Image Caption:  In this image women and children arrive at a death camp. Unknown to them, they had mere hours to live. Sadly, it is not hard to see how frightened they must have been.

The Jews arrested by the Nazis were transported to concentration camps on trains but not in comfortable passenger cars. They were forced to travel in overcrowded and poorly ventilated freight and cattle cars. Even here, no dignity was considered for them.

Inside the rail cars, men, women and children were forced to stand for hours without food and water as the trains made their way slowly to concentration camps across Europe. A pail in one corner of the car served as a toilet for all. When the trains arrived at their destinations, some people, especially the sick and elderly, had died of thirst or suffocation en route because of the overcrowding. Most of them were unaware of their fate.

Image Caption:  In this image, women are being herded aboard cattle cars to a concentration camp. The cattle cars are clearly visible in the background. Many of those in poor health died in the cramped and poorly ventilated railway cars.

Life in the German concentration camps was unbearable. The camps weren't much better than the railway's cattle cars that had brought them there. They were constructed with row upon row of barrack-style houses and were secured by barbed-wire fences, guard towers and patrolling soldiers.

Inside, the barracks there was nothing more than rows of beds stacked from floor to ceiling. There was little space between each row and hardly any room to move around in each bed. Here too, there was little food and water. Usually, all of the Jews, regardless of age, had their heads shavened and their clothes confiscated and replaced with stripped prison-like uniforms.

Thousands in the camps died from starvation, disease, and exposure to the cold and damp weather. Others were shot at the whim of the Nazis guards. Those Jews that were imprisioned in the work camps had their lives spared but were fed only enough food to keep them alive. Nutrition was poor. Barely more than skin and bones, these workers endured equally horrible conditions.

Image Caption:  In this image, a group of women can be seen marching from a concentration camp. Sometimes they were required to do hard work in gravel pits and rock quarries. Often the work served no purpose but to further humiliate the captured Jews.

By the end of the war, an estimated six million Jews had been killed in one way or another inside and outside concentration camps across Europe. No one knows for sure how many children were killed but it is believed to be between 1.2 and 1.5 million. Poland lost the greatest portion of it Jewish population. Denmark, thanks to the concern of almost its entire population, saved ninety-seven percent of its Jewish population, more than any other country in Europe.

The Polish Jews suffered more than any other group at the hands of the Nazis, but they were not the only victims. Poland's non-jewish population also suffered great losses. Anyone who came to the aid of Jews had their homes destroyed or were arrested. In Poland, where helping Jews was punishable by death, many were killed for helping their Jewish friends and fellow citizens. Millions more Poles were killed as part of Hitler's plan to eliminate people of non-Aryan descent. An estimated two million Poles were used in slave labour camps and over 1.5 million, some of them children, were deported in cattle cars to Siberian Russia. Many died of exposure enroute. Historically important buildings such as churches and synagoues were destroyed and many documents detailing Polish history were destroyed. It is estimated that five million Poles lost their lives to Hitler's madness. Because Polish newspapers were forbidden, the world knew very little about what was happening. For many Poles, this tragedy is the forgotten holocaust.

Image Caption:  In this photo, children wait their freedom as Allied soldiers reach their camp. Dressed in prison-like clothing, these children may have been used as slave labour or as subjects in medical experiments. The children that survived outside of the camps did so because they were hidden in homes, basements and convents or lived with Christian families who concealed their identities.

Shortly after the war ended in 1949, the surviving officers of the German army responsible for killing the Jews were placed on trial for war crimes. The word Holocaust, which means "burn" was first used in the late 1950's to refer to the death of Jews at the hands the Nazis. In the years that followed many of the German officers who committed these crimes but had escaped capture, were hunted down, put on trial for their part in the crime and imprisoned or hanged for their actions. Much has been written about the Holocaust as a sad chapter in human history with the hope that this never happens again to any people.

The Rescuers

Suspecting what was likely to happen to the Jews arrested by the Germans, it is little wonder that many people wanted to save their Jewish friends and countrymen, even at the risk of their own and their family's lives.

Afterword

In their arrogance, the Nazis recorded their deeds in pictures and documents. The pictures here, used by permission, are a few of the hundreds that exist that now forever remind us of the horror that is possible in man's sometimes inhumanity to man. In writing about this sad chapter of human history and in teaching it to our children, it is hoped that they will see to it that no such tragedies, on any scale, ever happens again.