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

by Alice Hoffman

“You heard the past,” Anne said.

Magpies took what they wanted and did as they pleased.

She wondered what it was like to be so good and unquestioning and how it felt to believe everything you were told and never imagine anything brand new.

what the future would be, not because she was a fortune teller, but because she had experienced the past.

“Anne, with a book you will never be alone.” And that was how she knew he sometimes felt as she did and that he understood that even when you were surrounded by people, sitting at the dinner table with your family or celebrating a holiday, it was possible to feel as if you were alone, and that when you felt that way, you could open a book and turn the page and feel known by someone you had never even met.

She slipped the ribbon into her pocket. It would serve to remind her to look beyond what other people saw, to see light where there was darkness and remember that even though fall was approaching, in time it would once again be spring.

“We’re not coming back after today,” Clara said. “We’re going into the countryside and leaving everything behind. I would hate to have this book destroyed. The Germans will burn whatever they find.” She took an old volume from a pile of books that had been stacked against a brick wall. “Would you burn birds in a cage?” she asked Anne. “Of course not.” Anne thought of the magpie. She thought of the soldiers shooting at whatever they saw, just for fun.

“And yet they burn books. They throw them into 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.” Madame Clara’s bright eyes were trained on Anne. It was dark in the alley and Anne had the urge to run, but she stayed where she was. “I used to have everything,” the bookseller’s wife said. “Now I just have what I can remember.”

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 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.”

“No matter what, I won’t leave you,” Edith told her daughter as they approached the building. “I know you won’t,” Anne said. It was so strange that you could be so angry at your mother for so long, and then, all at once, let it go so that every breath you took felt different.