Annemarie Johansen

Annemarie Johansen is a ten-year-old girl trying to understand the increasingly complex world around her. Her young life in Denmark had been filled with the normal preoccupations of peacetime until three years ago, when German soldiers arrived and her sister, Lise, was killed. There is much Annemarie is not told by her family at this time. She was seven when Lise was killed and is twelve before learning that Lise was killed at a meeting of the Danish Resistance, to which both Lise and her fiancy, Peter, belonged. As the book opens, Annemarie knows none of this, because her parents try to preserve the normalcy of her childhood during these troubled times.

However, Annemarie has begun to grow up, forced by circumstances to receive a crash course on the ways of war. She is old enough to feel a need to take part in her own destiny...