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

by Alice Hoffman

Anne sometimes thought her favorite words were Once upon a time, even though her mother always told her to wake up and pay more attention to her schoolwork and her chores and not always be reading one of her books.

Hate had become legal; it was everywhere.

Oma had warned her that the worst things happened when you least expected them, they came the way a hard rain fell, when you had your eyes closed, when you were too busy thinking about other things. On an ordinary day, when the weather seemed fine, that’s when it happened, that’s when the whole world changed.

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

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

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

Time is a circle, and what happens in one country can begin in another. Terror can grow beyond borders, a forest of black trees with thorns on every branch.

What happened in Germany had begun as a tiny seed of hatred, the smallest blister, a few evil men. How could Oma tell her beloved granddaughter what could happen when that seed bloomed? How could she reveal to her sweet child that evil was everywhere, in the hearts of your neighbors, and the postman, and your friends next door? Hatred was contagious, it spread from one household to the next, a slow infection of the spirit and the soul.

Parents think their children don’t hear when they whisper about all that is wrong; they think their daughters don’t know when they hide in the kitchen to cry. Parents convince themselves they can stare at their children with a blank expression and their children won’t know that something is amiss. Life had changed, but they insisted it would change back. This bad time was temporary, a season of hatred, and such seasons never lasted, they vanished as time went on and everything would be as it was.

They thought they were shivering in the cold, but that wasn’t it at all. Fear has a way of staying with you, even when you tell yourself you’re safe.

“Pay no attention to me,” Oma said whenever she was asked if something was wrong. The truth was, everything was so wrong she didn’t know where to begin.

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.

What happened once can happen again, even if you lock your doors, even if you’re honest and fair and have obeyed all the rules.

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.

He had thought of good and evil as concepts before, but now they felt as real as a stone or a book, as real as a scorpion or a leaf. Good and evil breathed as if they were human; they walked down the streets and slipped under the door, they held you in an embrace or grabbed you by the throat, they comforted you or tore you apart.

We could not enter museums or libraries, not restaurants, not the theaters or the zoo, or any public buildings, even markets that weren’t meant specifically for Jews. Dogs were allowed to sit on park benches, but we were not.

Anne made a list of all the things that had disappeared. It had begun slowly and then it wasn’t slow at all. It was one thing and then it was everything. That was how the Nazis took over, so that people didn’t understand what was happening until their dignity was stripped away and they were no longer considered human. One, two, three and the world had shrunk to nothing.

They looked at each other and laughed because they both knew he would buy the book for her. He had always been the sort of man who believed that books were as important as food when it came to nourishing a person. It might have been the last belief he managed to hold on to, one he refused to give up. He had taught her that the ancient myths grasped best the emotions inside everyone, the fear of being abandoned, of letting evil into the world, of wanting to go so high you would fly too close to the sun.

When Anne read, the world opened up. The other world, where good people didn’t suffer, where magic was possible, where women who resembled her grandmother could give her the advice she badly needed.

Anne turned on her side and raised herself up on one elbow. “I’m dreaming,” she said. Margot laughed her beautiful, soft laugh. “With your eyes open?” “Exactly. That’s the best way. That’s the way I can think up a story.”

The Jewish Council the Nazis had installed had suggested they should all be proud to wear the Star of David, the symbol of their faith, and some among them even said the star would protect them from evil, that it was a sign of the Jews’ solidarity. But most people were quiet and frightened; they understood that the source of their pride was now being made to humiliate them.

Perhaps that was what it meant to be in love. For a little while at least it was possible to forget everyone else.

Things disappeared, she knew that now, she knew it every time she walked through the dining room, where her grandmother had slept. People in their neighborhood would soon begin to vanish, the ones who were in the Resistance, the ones who had wealth the Germans wanted, the ones who had done nothing at all, the ones who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time because life wasn’t fair, and when dealing with people like the Nazis, nothing made sense.

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’t stop talking.

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.”

We have learned that it’s best to honor the past by remembering it, and to not allow the horrific deeds of war to go unspoken, no matter how difficult it is to take in the knowledge. If we do not discuss the past, there are surely those who will take the opportunity to deny the truth and insist it never happened in the first place.

A book belongs to its author, but it belongs to the reader as well, and a book can mean many things to many people.

It is Anne’s singular voice, funny, annoying, and brilliant, which allows readers to feel that they know her. It is a voice so personal that when we read her diary we become Anne, and through her we experience a life we have never led. The book is both a warning and a blessing. What happened once can happen again.

Writing historical fiction is much like writing a mystery—we must invent what we cannot know. We take pieces of history and re-create the world.