When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary

Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl has touched millions of people in myriad countries as it poignantly recalls her life in hiding in occupied Holland under the Nazis’ reign of terror. Passionate, justice-seeking, and imaginative, the Anne who readers meet in the diary is a girl who longs for love, desires to see her dream of being a writer realized, and hopes for freedom, even as the noose of tyranny tightens around her and her family and country.

In When We Flew Away, author Alice Hoffman employs historical research and the imaginative language of fairytales and myths to explore Anne’s life from the time the Nazis invaded Holland until her family was forced into hiding. In acknowledgements, Hoffman explains her method, “Fiction is meant to make sense of a world that is so unbelievably cruel that sometimes we can only begin to understand the past and the present in the language of fairy tales and myths.”

Hoffman portrays Anne as independent and vivacious, fired up with imagination, and able to perceive in fleeting glimpses, here and there, the steady thrust of evil. Hoffman also paints Anne as confident and bold, yet secretly worried that her mother loves her “perfect” sister Margot more than she loves Anne. As the family is faced with increasingly severe restrictions and deepening humiliations, Hoffman imagines how Anne begins to see her mother and Margot in a new light, and to love more deeply her compassionate, literary father, who taught her so much about myths, fairy tales, and other literary genres.

Published in cooperation with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, this novel for children ages 11 and older presents an age-appropriate window into the evils and terrors of war and how it affects people’s lives. When We Flew Away laments all that Anne and millions of others lost and explores the role of hope, bravery, and love in extremely dire circumstances. An excellent contribution to the vast number of books written about World War II, this novel leaves readers with the challenge to remember Anne and the millions who lost their lives in the Nazi death camps. (Scholastic Press)