Number the Stars Read Online Free Page B

shiny."
    Kirsti nodded. "All right, then," she said. "But you mustn't tell anyone that they're
fish.
I don't want anyone to know." She took her new shoes, holding them disdainfully, and put them on a chair. Then she looked with interest at the paper dolls.
    "Can I play, too?" Kirsti asked. "Can I have a doll?" She squatted beside Annemarie and Ellen on the floor.
    Sometimes, Annemarie thought, Kirsti was such a pest, always butting in. But the apartment was small. There was no other place for Kirsti to play. And if they told her to go away, Mama would scold.
    "Here," Annemarie said, and handed her sister a cut-out little girl doll. "We're playing
Gone With the Wind.
Melanie and Scarlett are going to a ball. You can be Bonnie. She's Scarlett's daughter."
    Kirsti danced her doll up and down happily. "I'm going to the ball!" she announced in a high, pretend voice.
    Ellen giggled. "A little girl wouldn't go to a ball. Let's make them go someplace else. Let's make them go to Tivoli!"
    "Tivoli!" Annemarie began to laugh. "That's in Copenhagen!
Gone With the Wind
is in America!"
    "Tivoli, Tivoli, Tivoli," little Kirsti sang, twirling her doll in a circle.
    "It doesn't matter, because it's only a game anyway," Ellen pointed out. "Tivoli can be over there, by that chair. 'Come, Scarlett,'" she said, using her doll voice, "'we shall go to Tivoli to dance and watch the fireworks, and maybe there will be some handsome men there! Bring your silly daughter Bonnie, and she can ride on the carousel.'"
    Annemarie grinned and walked her Scarlett toward the chair that Ellen had designated as Tivoli. She loved Tivoli Gardens, in the heart of Copenhagen; her parents had taken her there, often, when she was a little girl. She remembered the music and the brightly colored lights, the carousel and ice cream and especially the magnificent fireworks in the evenings: the huge colored splashes and bursts of lights in the evening sky.
    "I remember the fireworks best of all," she commented to Ellen.
    "Me too," Kirsti said. "I remember the fireworks."
    "Silly," Annemarie scoffed. "You never saw the fireworks." Tivoli Gardens was closed now. The German occupation forces had burned part of it, perhaps as a way of punishing the fun-loving Danes for their lighthearted pleasures.
    Kirsti drew herself up, her small shoulders stiff. "I did too," she said belligerently. "It was my birthday. I woke up in the night and I could hear the booms. And there were lights in the sky. Mama said it was fireworks for my birthday!"
    Then Annemarie remembered. Kirsti's birthday was late in August. And that night, only a month before, she, too, had been awakened and frightened by the sound of explosions. Kirsti was right—the sky in the southeast had been ablaze, and Mama had comforted her by calling it a birthday celebration. "Imagine, such fireworks for a little girl five years old!" Mama had said, sitting on their bed, holding the dark curtain aside to look through the window at the lighted sky.
    The next evening's newspaper had told the sad truth. The Danes had destroyed their own naval fleet, blowing up the vessels one by one, as the Germans approached to take over the ships for their own use.
    "How sad the king must be," Annemarie had heard Mama say to Papa when they read the news.
    "How proud," Papa had replied.
    It had made Annemarie feel sad and proud, too, to picture the tall, aging king, perhaps with tears in his blue eyes, as he looked at the remains of his small navy, which now lay submerged and broken in the harbor.
    "I don't want to play anymore, Ellen," she said suddenly, and put her paper doll on the table.
    "I have to go home, anyway," Ellen said. "I have to help Mama with the housecleaning. Thursday is our New Year. Did you know that?"
    "Why is it yours?" asked Kirsti. "Isn't it our New Year, too?"
    "No. It's the Jewish New Year. That's just for us. But if you want, Kirsti, you can come that night and watch Mama light the candles."
    Annemarie and Kirsti had