Review Detail

“When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary” by Alice Hoffman delves into Anne’s life before she went into hiding, yet the experiences are still harrowing and strike a nerve in the fabric of society.

Anne’s life is pretty good overall. She has a family, including a loving father, a mother who can often be hard on her, but who loves her all the same, a sister, Margot, and a grandmother, whom she calls Oma. Their life is average, but it’s worthwhile. Until one day when life begins to change. Jews begin to have restrictions put on them, and while Anne’s family never really placed so much emphasis on their Judaism, they find that they are looked at no differently than those whose observances are strikingly different. Little by little, people around them begin to look at them in a changed light, treat them differently, and not accept them as equals. They are made to register with the government, and while it isn’t billed as “keeping track” of them, it is allowing the government to know exactly where each and every Jew lives, who lives with them, and more.

As their lives begin to unravel and they lose confidence that they will find a way out of the country to safety, Anne and her family try to remain calm to get through it, to see their way to their futures, but their world looks bleaker with each passing day.

In this fictionalized telling of Anne’s life before she and her family went into hiding, we learn how the world is not always so pleasant and welcoming. People can be viciously terrible, and the world may do nothing to protect you. Finding ways to protect yourself and those you love is difficult and troubling, and while one may feel alone at times, if one is to stop sharing these stories and trying to find ways to overcome the problems, it may keep happening. As Anne’s mother tells her at one point, “We are doing something. We’re refusing to believe the story they’re telling about us.” The Holocaust, and Anne’s experience leading up to it must never happen again, and this book is one way to understand how seeing it coming and stepping up to try to do something about it before it does is of vital importance to who we are as individuals and as a society. The back matter of the book provides more insight into the reality that was the Holocaust and how Anne’s family was captured, leaving only her father alive when the war was over.