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

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

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

All you needed to believe in yourself was to know that someone loved you, the real you, the you deep inside.

He knew what happened when you did as you were told; you often lost the best part of yourself.

Hatred arises so quickly that one drop is all it takes before it spreads like ink on a page.

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

We could not sleep through the night after the bombs had fallen. Our family had scattered all over the world, but we did not fit into the quota of Jews allowed into America or England or Switzerland. We still thought it was impossible for the race laws in Germany to be put into effect here. We believed in what was fair. We didn’t understand that hatred changes everything and, in the morning, when we woke, we found we were afraid of the world outside. It was far too quiet. It no longer belonged to us. It was a place where anything could happen. There were no longer ordinary days. We stepped outside into a different world.

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.

That was when Anne realized that there were times when silence was worse than an argument.

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.”