And the answer: Lois Lowry.
Number the Stars was first published in 1989, and is a work of historical fiction. The story centers on 10-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her family, who live in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1943. As Jews, the Johansen family finds themselves forced to flee their home to avoid a brutal fate at the hands of Nazis.
In the years following World War II, the need to process and express the trauma of war laid heavy on the mind of many artists, authors, and everyday people. Some of the first works that sought to memorialize the lives lost to the Nazi regime came from the survivors of the camps themselves, such as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel (who wrote the novel Night) and Tadeusz Borowski (who wrote a number of short stories and poems about his experiences in concentration camps). Some forms of Holocaust literature were diaries, such as that of Anne Frank, which told the story of the Holocaust through first hand events and were published after the war. Others took the form of poetry, or a blending of fiction and autobiography.
Since the postwar period, significant strides to raise and advance the stories of Holocaust survivors have taken place. One such project, at the University of Washington in St. Louis, has recently embarked on a significant research and documentation project that ultimately seeks to “theorize Holocaust literature as a comprehensive literary system for the first time.” Rather than relying on the stories of just a handful of Holocaust survivors, the project will conduct research and compile extensive accounts of the events before, during, and after the war’s conclusion to give justice to the many, multifaceted experiences that the violence created.
Did you know?
Yesterday, January 27th, was Holocaust Memorial Day. January 27th marks the anniversary of the liberation of the largest Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, by Soviet troops in 1945. Designated in 2005 by the United Nations General Assembly, the day commemorates the 6 million Jewish lives lost during the Holocaust, as well as the millions of other people killed under Nazi persecution of other groups. Learn more about Holocaust Memorial Day here.
