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

by Alice Hoffman

If this had been another time, Anne might have been too young to have a boyfriend, but no one was too young anymore.

She wished they had all the time in the world. She wished they were birds that could fly away, but she knew they were not.

The only difference between reading and being with Hello was that this time they were in this together and she wasn’t alone. They had been to another place where no one could reach them, but they had been there together.

All that Anne knew was that every morning Hello was waiting for her at the bicycle shed, and they walked and talked as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. Perhaps that was what it meant to be in love. For a little while at least it was possible to forget everyone else.

No Jewish writers could be read; it was a crime to do so, and yet, despite this, Anne kept the fact that she wanted to be a writer to herself. It seemed preposterous. She was only a young girl with nothing to say, and yet the best of her gifts was the diary. She could already tell it would be a trusted friend she could tell her secrets to.

When Anne continued to talk during lessons, unable to sit still or be quiet, and had been warned countless times to stop talking, her teacher required that she write an essay titled “A Chatterbox.” How unlike her sister she was, for Margot’s work was always brilliant, with excellent grades, and she never had to be reprimanded, whereas Anne kept talking. A day later, she was asked to write a second essay, which he titled “An Incorrigible Chatterbox.” When she still had not stopped talking to her friends, she was assigned to write a third, called “Quack, Quack, Quack, Said Mistress Chatterback.” “Would you rather me say nothing at all?” Anne asked. “At times, yes. For instance, when I’m speaking.” The class all laughed at that remark. Their teacher had a good sense of humor, so Anne, with the help of her friend Sanne, who was so good at rhyming, wrote something that she thought might amuse the other students and their teacher as well. Maybe she could be a writer; maybe she could start right now. “‘Quack, quack, quack,’ said Mistress Chatterback,” the teacher read aloud to the class. Even he thought the poem Anne had written about being unable to keep silent was well done and funny, and after that her teacher no longer seemed annoyed when Anne talked to her friends. “Just keep it down,” he said. That was the power of writing, Anne realized, it could make people understand you, it could bring them over to your side, it could show them you were more than a silly girl who couldn...

You cannot reason with people who are unreasonable, Oma had once told Anne. You cannot expect the Nazis to act like normal people. Evil people tell themselves a story they come to believe. They tell themselves they are good, and everyone else is inhuman. They tell themselves they are doing what heaven would will them to do.

“We should have done something,” Anne said. “We are doing something.” Anne looked at her mother, confused, but her mother looked sure of herself. “We’re refusing to believe the story they’re telling about us.”

Everything is brand new, how could I know what love is yet? Shouldn’t I have my whole life ahead of me? Shouldn’t I fall in love a dozen times over and have my heart broken and break someone else’s heart in return? Shouldn’t I have all the time in the world?

He didn’t tell her that he had heard that on Friday, the 26th of June, the Jewish Council had been told that all Jews between the ages of sixteen and forty would be sent to work camps in Germany. It began with little more than three hundred taken for the camps each day, but that was only the beginning. More and more people were called up every day.

Be late and you might never be found again, not if we searched the whole world over. Don’t let us lose you this way.

It would happen now on an ordinary afternoon when sunlight flooded the rooftop. The doorbell rang and an unfamiliar man’s voice was drifting up. It was a summer afternoon and everything was the same, and then, before they knew what was happening, nothing would ever be the same again. Both sisters heard their mother cry out after she closed the door, hurrying with the latch. But it was one lock, not a thousand, and it would never keep out what was waiting for them. A man had just left their house. He walked in a strange way, the way a goblin might, but he was a policeman, an everyday policeman who was posted in this neighborhood, sent to deliver messages from the government. Margot had run out of her room and now she and their mother were huddled together. She sensed that something terrible had happened; she could feel it in her bones. Edith grew pale and blurted, “It’s a call-up for the labor camp.” Margot had heard rumors about what it meant to be called up by a government order. They had all heard the rumors. They would be told they would return, but most vanished and never did.