Number the Stars title was taken from Psalm 147 read by a resistance fighter character in the book. Lois Lowry found her inspiration for the novel from a friend who had experienced German occupation in Denmark and although the characters are fictitious, they were compiled from many people who lived in Denmark during WWII.
The story focuses on two girls, Annemarie and her Jewish friend Ellen. It shows how families in occupied countries were brave and stepped out to help their persecuted friends and neighbors. G.F. Duckwitz, a high ranking German official had warned local rabbis that the Jews would soon be relocated and the Danes quickly took action to ferry families across the sea in fishing boats to Sweden which had purported to be neutral. Nearly all Jews (7,000) were rescued with the exception of those who ignored the warning.
One brilliant idea to protect the Jews hiding in boats was for the fishermen to carry a handkerchief laced with rabbit blood and cocaine. The blood attracted military dogs searching for people and the cocaine deadened their senses temporarily.
Lois Lowry ends the Afterword with a quote in a letter from a resistance fighter to his mother shortly before he was executed.
. . . and I want you all to remember - that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one. That is the great gift our country hungers for, something every little peasant boy can look forward to and with pleasure feel he is a part of - something he can work and fight for.
