As with all historical novels, Number the Stars by Lois Lowry is a mixture of fact and fiction. In the Afterword to the book, Lowry sets out the precise relationship between fact and fiction in her narrative in order to answer the question of how much of Annemarie's story is true.

As Lowry readily conceded, Annemarie Johansen is a child of her imagination. In other words, she's a made-up character. Yet the historical events with which she and her family are forced to deal are completely real.

What Lowry has done, as she says in the Afterword, is to create Annemarie and her family and place them in a specific historical setting, where they are forced to deal with the real events of 1943.

In showing us what life was like in Denmark under Nazi occupation, Lowry has drawn upon stories told to her by her good friend Annelise Platt, to whom Number the Stars is dedicated.

Annelise was a child growing up in the Danish capital Copenhagen during the Nazi occupation and has given Lowry valuable information concerning what life was like for ordinary people at such a terrible time.

Annelise's descriptions of how people suffered under the Nazis, how they nonetheless made huge sacrifices and showed great courage and integrity, form the basis of much of the action in the story.

The characters in the story may be fictitious, but the heroic actions that they undertake were carried out in real life by real people in real situations.