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

by Alice Hoffman

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.

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.

Anyone who didn’t fly away soon discovered it was too late. The sky was wide, but the world they inhabited was small, and before you knew it there was nowhere to escape to, and even the sky was crisscrossed by nets.

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

Hatred was contagious, it spread from one household to the next, a slow infection of the spirit and the soul.

“When you are young,” Oma said, “time goes slowly, and when you are old, you want to reverse time and go backward.”

Fear has a way of staying with you, even when you tell yourself you’re safe.

they had become fish in a net, they were already drowning, only they didn’t know it yet.

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.

Rules change, they’re broken so easily it seemed they’d been made of paper or thread.

Even children knew that they lived in a world in which it was dangerous to ask questions. If you did, you might just get the answers.

but how do you know what you cannot know?

metal trash cans and light a fire and then all the words that had been written fly away.” “What happens to the words then?” Anne asked. “They’re remembered by everyone who ever read them.”

He had always been the sort of man who believed that books were as important as food when it came to nourishing a person.

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.

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?

Remember us. That is what she wished for. That is what she’d written down. Remember me.