...We all know that the events that happened under the regime of the Third Reich were the most huge and horrible events in the history of mankind.

But when I asked Annelise to describe her childhood then, she didn't describe anything huge and horrible. She said things like: "I remember being cold."

And: "I remember wearing mittens to bed."

Those were exactly the kinds of things — the small, almost inconsequential details of a child's life, from day to day, that I realized, quite suddenly, would tell a larger story.

I would be a terrible newspaper reporter because I can't write well about huge events. They use the verb cover in newsrooms. They send reporters out to "cover" things. But if they sent me out to "cover" some catastrophe, I would stand there watching while flood water carried away houses, and flames spurted into the sky, and buildings toppled, and victims were extricated by the hundreds. I would watch it all, and I would see it all. But I would write about a broken lunch box lying shattered in a puddle.

As a writer, I find that I can only cover the small and the ordinary — the mittens on a shivering child — and hope that they evoke the larger events. The huge and horrible are beyond my powers...

When I asked Annelise to describe, through the eyes of her own childhood, the German soldiers themselves, she said: "I remember the high shiny boots."

...As all writers do, I had to sift and sort through the details and select what to use. There were some that I had to discard, though I didn't want to. The image of wearing mittens to bed was one of those that eventually I had to let go of. The events about which I wrote took place entirely in October — it simply wasn't mitten weather yet. But I would ask you all tonight, sitting here as we are in great comfort and luxury, to remember that in the winter of 1943 a little girl wore mittens to bed because she was cold.

I certainly did use — and use and use — those high shiny boots. Annelise had mentioned them first, and then, when I pored over the old photographs, I saw them myself, again and again.

When I had delivered the completed manuscript to my editor, he called it to my attention. Walter Lorraine has been my editor — and friend — for seventeen books. I listen to what he says with great respect, and though we occasionally argue, he is almost always right.

This time he said that there were too many references in the book to the shiny boots. And I listened. I listened with respect. But I looked at the photographs again, and I tried to place myself within the visual awareness of a child. Sometimes we forget that their vantage point is lower than ours. They don't look into adult faces. Certainly a frightened child would not look into the faces of enemy soldiers. As Annelise did, the child would see — and notice, more than an adult — those terrifying boots. I asked Walter to give me a little time to make that decision, and he agreed...

That fall, the fall of 1988, when this book had been written and was still in the late stages of editing, I was sent by my British publisher on a tour of Australia and New Zealand. I had just seen the first preliminary design for the cover of Number the Stars (Houghton), the first time I had seen the art director's — Sue Sherman's — plan to use that beautiful gold necklace, with the Star of David, embossed against the haunting face of the young girl.

When I was in Brisbane, Australia, I met a woman, slightly younger than I, who was wearing an identical necklace. It is not an unusual necklace — indeed, its simplicity is what makes it so beautiful. But when I saw it around her neck, I described the book, and its cover, to the woman. And she told me her story. I think she would not mind my retelling it, to you.

She had been born in Holland, to a Jewish mother and a Christian father. That mixed parentage made her a potential victim, of course, of the Nazis. So her parents had created a hiding place under the floorboards of their Amsterdam apartment — a place to hide a tiny child, if the moment should come when it was needed.

As we know, those terrible moments did come; they came all too often. When the Nazis banged on the door of that Amsterdam apartment, as they did on the door of the Copenhagen apartment in my book, this little girl, no more than a toddler, was quickly lifted into the hiding place. She huddled there and watched through a crack in the boards while they took her mother away.

She told me that she wears the necklace in memory of the mother she never saw again.

I asked her, as we sat there talking, if she remembered any of it.

She said that the memory was very vague, because she had been so very young. There was only one thing, she told me, that she recalled clearly from that day when she had peeked out through a crack in the floor.

She said: "I remember the high shiny boots."

So when I went back to the United States, back to Walter, I asked him to leave the boots there in the book — every reference — again and again and again. I decided that if any reviewer should call attention to the overuse of that image — none ever has — I would simply tell them that those high shiny boots had trampled on several million childhoods and I was sorry I hadn't had several million more pages on which to mention that.

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