The story that we read for our I-Search project was called Number the Stars by: Louis Lowry. It is about three girls that live in Denmark. Since Denmark is the setting of our novel, we decided that we would research the country of Denmark for Math and Social Studies. For Social Studies we researched the Danish flag. For Math we researched the average yearly rainfall in the city that our book opened in, Copenhagen.

The main characters were named Annemarie, and Ellen.

Ellen is Jewish, and at this time their country is getting taken over by Nazis. At every street corner there is at least one Nazi officer. The Nazis always stop people to make sure there are not doing any thing that can destroy their army.

The Rosen’s (Ellen and her parents) went to temple one day and found out that the Nazis stole the list of all the members of their temple. Then the Jewish people got scared because the Nazis were going to take all the Jewish away. They didn’t know where they were going or what was happening. Ellen went to stay with Annemarie and her family for awile.

One night the Nazis came to Annemarie’s house. They came because they wanted to check the houses to see if there were any Jewish people hiding. When the Nazis came they saw Ellen and she has dark hair and the rest of the family has blond hair. The Nazis got suspicious and asked a lot of questions about Ellen, she had to pretend that she was named Lise (Lise is Annemarie’s older sister that have died from being in the resistance and got hit by a car). Lucky for Ellen the pictures of Lise when she was little she had dark hair. The Nazis left and they got away with it and the Nazis never found out.

The next day the Jonsand’s went to their uncle’s house (Uncle Hedrick). They took the train to his house about one hour away, and stayed there for a wile. Their uncle is a fisherman and he lives near the sea. From where he lives he can see to Sweden. Sweden is a free country meaning that there are no Nazi solders in that country so all the Jewish people are free.

One night Uncle Henrick took Ellen outside and when she came in her parents were with her. Then a casket came in and many other people came. After a while no one opened the casket, then the Nazis came and wanted them to open the casket. Mrs. Johnson said that her Aunt Birdie had typhus and the germs might get all over the place and everyone could get the disease. So the solder slapped Mrs. Johnson across the face and said “You wait until me and my solders are gone!” Then, when the soldiers left, they opened the casket and there were winter clothes so that the people would be warm. Then Uncle Henry took the Rosen’s and the rest of the people to his boat to take to Sweden. He was in the Resistance, so he has a special compartment so that he can hide the Jewish people on his boat and bring them safely to Sweden.

The next morning before they left, the dogs came with the Nazi solders and wanted to check the boat. Uncle Henry had a handkerchief that had the scent of dry rabbits blood and cocaine. What this invention did was make the dogs be attracted to the scent, but when the dogs went to sniff it, the cocaine destroyed their sense of smell. Because of this we researched the olfactory system in a dog. This was to meet the Science requirement of our project.

Once the dogs and Nazi solders left, Uncle Henry brought all the people to Sweden safely and then they were free. The Johnson’s were very happy that they were free. 

          We also were interested in the types of military used during that time period so we researched the different tanks, airplanes, and other things. For our Art requirement we redesigned the cover of the book so that it would be appealing to both boys and girls.

By: Brian S.