King Christian X died on April 20, 1947, four years after my grandfather's spring death and two years after Hitler's suicide on April 30, 1945. King Fredrick IX assumed the Danish throne after the death of his father and reigned until January 14, 1972, when his daughter Queen Margarete II assumed the throne upon the death of her father.

My mother left Denmark in December 1948, with my brother, who was born there, and her first husband, Corporal James W. Miles, an Army paratrooper from Kannapolis, North Carolina, who was killed in 1950 during the Korean War when my mother was 21. Because she had promised her first husband that she would raise their son in the United States, she stayed in Kannapolis, a company mill town. Eventually Mom met my father, Howard C. Ballard, a Master Sergeant in the Air Force and, by the time I was born, a full-time member of the North Carolina Air National Guard.

In June 1970 my mother took my sister Heidi and me home with her to Denmark, which was her first trip back since 1948. Although her brother Herman, my grandmother, and my great aunt, Tante Anna, had all visited us before 1970, I'm still amazed that Mom did not see Denmark for nearly 22 years.

On her first trip home, Mom took Heidi and me to Roskilde Cathedral, where Danish royalty have been entombed for centuries. My mother wanted to honor her dead king as well as introduce my sister and me to Denmark's history. At Roskilde, each monarch has a castrum doloris, and their usually highly decorative coffins, with the notable exception of King Fredrick IX, are displayed in these decorated areas of the cathedral rather than being buried in the ground. To honor Christian X's connection to the Danish Resistance during World War II, the Danes decorated his coffin with a carving of an armband worn by the Resistance. When my mother saw Christian X's coffin, she cried. I'm not sure who all she was mourning at the time, but now I wonder if some of the tears were for her past as well as for her king.

My siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews have all heard Mother's stories for years. As the youngest of her children, I used to beg her to tell me about Denmark and especially about World War II while I waited on my sister to come home from school. I have always known about King Christian X, the Danish Resistance, and my mother's own childhood insubordination to the Germans who occupied her country. I may have learned more about World War II and the Holocaust from my family than from K-12 history lessons.

When I first read Lois Lowry's book, I felt I was rereading a story I had heard often, and I knew some of her characters well.

One story I learned to love involved King Christian X deciding to wear an armband with a yellow Star of David to show his solidarity with Jewish Danes and with Jews in general. Lowry does not share that story because by 1989 when she published her book, the story was known as an urban myth. To learn about this urban myth, navigate to the King Christian page and go to Armband Urband Legend.