A Moment with Lois Lowry:

Award-winning author of The Giver, Number the Stars and many other children's books

Nadine Epstein

Most children in America have read at least one of Lois Lowry’s books and fallen in love with it. Lowry, 73, is the author of more than 30 books for children, but two are among her the most-read and widely discussed: The Giver, her 1994 Newbery award-winning dystopian novel about a boy assigned by his community to receive all the memories of the past, and Number the Stars, her 1990 Newbery award winner, which deals with how Denmark saved its Jews during the Holocaust. Moment editor Nadine Epstein talks with Lowry about why she wrote about the Holocaust, why these novels are sometimes banned and why her childhood favorites are no longer read.

You were raised as a Presbyterian. What inspired you to write Number the Stars, a book about the Holocaust?

My friend Annelise grew up in Denmark. It was she who told me how the Christian Danes saved the Jewish population in 1943.

How did you research the book?

Annelise put me in touch with people who had been adults in 1943, including one woman who had been active in the resistance. And I went to the wonderful resistance museum in Copenhagen and also traveled up the coast to the town of Gilleleje, which would become part of the setting of the book. It is a real place, but I chose it for fictional purposes. It was the place on the Danish map that was close enough to look across the strait and see Sweden.

Did not being Jewish concern you?

I would never have been presumptuous enough to write the book from the Jewish point of view; I was really writing about the Christians in Denmark. I am sometimes asked why the Jewish child Ellen Rosen is not the main character in the book. I explain that when you’re writing a novel, you make the protagonist the person who has choices to make because that’s what propels a plot along. In the real-life case of Denmark, it was the Christians who had the decisions to make. Sadly, the Jewish people had no choices.

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