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

by Alice Hoffman

How wonderful it is that no one has to wait even a minute to start gradually changing the world… —Anne Frank

There is a day you never forget, the day the whole world changes. When you close your eyes, light becomes dark, night never ends, beasts walk freely down the street, stars fall from the sky.

You were young one second, and then you were far too old. You lived years in minutes and decades in weeks. You wanted to travel, you wanted to grow up, you wanted to be beautiful, you wanted to fall in love. You wanted so much that your heart broke in half, but half a heart is better than none, and your heart is stronger than anyone would guess.

When you write it down, they cannot pretend it never happened.

Dreams are the beginning, he always told Anne. They’re the stories we tell ourselves.

If you want to know who she is, Oma had told Anne’s mother, look more deeply. Look inside.

“Good people cannot understand evil. They don’t even recognize it,” Oma told her granddaughter. “That’s what happened in Germany.”

when some people are less than others, and only a select few have rights, anyone who doesn’t belong can never be safe.

How could she reveal to her sweet child that evil was everywhere, in the hearts of your neighbors, and the postman, and your friends next door? Hatred was contagious, it spread from one household to the next, a slow infection of the spirit and the soul.

One cannot know the future, and it was impossible then to suspect that the Netherlands would have the greatest percentage of Jews murdered of any western European country by the end of the war.