And so your mama does not know everything. “But,” he added, “it is much easier to be brave if you do not know everything. Frightened, but determined, and if the time came to be brave, I am quite sure you would be very, very brave. “I think you are like your mama, and like your papa, and like me. “I think that is not true,” Uncle Henrik said. The kitten cocked its head, waiting, still hoping for spilled milk. Behind him, Blossom lowered her head, grasped a mouthful of hay in her mouth, and drew it in with her tongue. Tall Uncle Henrik knelt before her so that his face was level with hers. “Not very,” she confessed, looking at the floor of the barn. When she asked it of herself, she didn’t like her own answer. It was a question she did not want to be asked. “How brave are you, little Annemarie?” asked suddenly. Tonight I am proud to have three daughters again.” “Don’t be frightened,” he said to them softly. He kissed the top of each head: Annemarie’s blond one, which reached to his shoulder, and Ellen’s dark hair, the thick curls braided as always into pigtails. Papa suddenly crossed the room and put his arms around them both. You are together so much, it will be easy for you to pretend that you are sisters.”Īnnemarie and Ellen got to their feet. If anyone should come, even soldiers, you two will be sisters. “Who might come? Will it be soldiers? Like the ones on the corners?” Annemarie remembered how terrified Ellen had looked the day when the soldier had questioned them on the corner. And if anyone comes-”Įllen interrupted him. It will be as your mama said: you two will sleep together in your bed, and you may giggle and talk and tell secrets to each other. Kirsti was right-the sky in the southeast had been ablaze, and Mama had comforted her by calling it a birthday celebration. And that night, only a month before, she, too, had been awakened and frightened by the sound of explosions. Mama said it was fireworks for my birthday!” I woke up in the night and I could hear the booms. Kirsti drew herself up, her small shoulders stiff. The German occupation forces had burned part of it, perhaps as a way of punishing the fun-loving Danes for their lighthearted pleasures. “You never saw the fireworks.” Tivoli Gardens was closed now. “I remember the fireworks best of all,” she commented to Ellen. She remembered the music and the brightly colored lights, the carousel and ice cream and especially the magnificent fireworks in the evenings: the huge colored splashes and bursts of lights in the evening sky. She loved Tivoli Gardens, in the heart of Copenhagen her parents had taken her there, often, when she was a little girl. As Annemarie learns important lessons about bravery, solidarity, sacrifice, and sisterhood, so too do Lowry’s readers.Īnnemarie grinned and walked her Scarlett toward the chair that Ellen had designated as Tivoli. As Annemarie’s ignorance lifts and she learns more and more about what’s truly at stake for her family, she is called upon to be brave in a way she never has before as she and her family work to ensure that Ellen, her parents, and several other Danish Jews can safely escape the country that has, in many ways, turned against them. Henrik is a smuggler, deeply entrenched in the Resistance-he helps hide Jews in his fishing boat and ferries them across the sea to Sweden, and to freedom. Annemarie, her younger sister Kirsti, her mother, and Ellen travel to Mama’s brother and Annemarie’s uncle Henrik’s house at the seaside, and there Annemarie learns that her family is not as ordinary as she thought. When it becomes clear that the officers are suspicious of Ellen’s presence in the Johansen household, however, Annemarie’s Mama and Papa decide to bring Ellen to the countryside to seek refuge. Annemarie and Ellen’s friendship turns into something stronger as they pretend to be sisters in order to shelter Ellen from the Nazis. However, when the Nazis begin shuttering local Jewish businesses and rounding up Jews for purposes of “relocating” them Annemarie and her family take in Ellen, who lives downstairs, while Ellen’s parents flee with members of the Resistance. Still, Annemarie believes that she and her family-“ordinary people”-will be able to wait out the war peacefully and safely by keeping their heads down, and will never be called upon to fight or act. Annemarie remembers the plentiful and carefree existence her family enjoyed before the war with longing-since the occupation and the death of her older sister, Lise, in a mysterious hit-and-run accident, nothing has been the same. The protagonist of the novel, ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen is an outgoing and ambitious young girl who maintains a cheerful outlook even as her Nazi-occupied hometown of Copenhagen becomes a dangerous place for her and her best friend Ellen Rosen, who is Jewish.