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. You remember everything. You see the leaves turning green on the elm trees along the canals after the spring snow. Songbirds are rising up from the branches, and the bells over the bookstore doors are still ringing. There is a heron sitting on a balcony, a bird that is a sign of good luck. You are wearing two sweaters and a coat though the day is warm. When you see black moths rising from deep underground, you can barely breathe. In this moment, you suddenly realize you may not always be with the ones you love. Something is happening all around you. This is when you understand that the story can change.

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

By 1940, German Jews were no longer allowed into parks or public schools or markets. Hate had become legal; it was everywhere.

“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.

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

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.

This was the way you learned about the world your parents thought they were protecting you from. You found out on your own. You looked and you saw what was behind everything they told you.

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.”

In her life, today was the day that was unlike any other, when one world ended and another began, when she held her mother’s hand, when her father was crying, when she didn’t care if she would be beautiful or not, when she just wanted to grow up, that’s all she would ask for now.