Contemporary reading theory has long suggested readers create individual experiences of books. I suspect my own experience of Number the Stars, Lois Lowry's 1989 novel about the German occupation of Denmark, is constructed by the many stories of that era my mother has shared with me all my life.

The main character in Lowry's book is 10-year old Annemarie, who lives in Copenhagen, the capitol of Denmark. My mother was 13 at the time of Annemarie's story. At the time, Mom lived in Aabenraa, Denmark, the last mainland town that suffered a causality in the April 9, 1940 German invasion.

All my life I've heard the stories that form the basis of Number the Stars. In particular, I'm drawn to the character of King Christian X in the novel because, since I was 9, I've had two different perspective of the king--one from my mother who always admired him and one from my grandmother who came to admire him after she initially distrusted him.

Except for dusty history books, very little is written about the time when Danes disliked King Christian X. In these pages, I attempt to complicate his historical person as well as the identity I know from my family's stories. I try to offer my family's story of Occupied Denmark as a confirmation that Lowry succeeds in doing what she attempted to do--to reveal "an ideal of human decency" that was reflected in the daily behavior of King Christian X, although his country was too weak to destroy the German army, and in the heroics of the Danish Resistance, which saved nearly all the Danish Jews from labor camps by smuggling them to Sweden.

For historical background to King Christian X and Occupied Denmark, go to Danish History.