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

by Alice Hoffman

Except that now, several black moths tapped at the window. Anne watched them through the glass and wondered where they had come from. There had only been one, and that one had seemed like a shadow that had arisen from her imagination, but now there were more all the time. Anne was fairly certain that one had slipped in through a window or flitted through an open door. She spied it in a corner, though it was invisible to most people’s eyes. It was there when her father said sleep tight, when he sat down with his book in his favorite chair, when he called her his darling girl. She saw the worry in his face.

The future arrived the way a wolf walked through the woods, silent as it passed through the neighborhood, searching for ways to satisfy its hunger. What you don’t hear you don’t see, not unless you narrow your eyes and peer through the dark. You have to light a candle and gaze beyond the treetops. You have to be prepared to see what you hoped you would never see. German soldiers on street corners, walking along the canals, massing in groups near the Amstel River.

They studied everyone they came upon with a cool glance, wary, checking for what they considered to be Jewish features—dark hair, dark eyes, individuals they thought were shifty and racially inferior.

When a free independent country is invaded and bombed by another country, it is an act not only of war, but of terror. Shouldn’t the world be up in arms? Shouldn’t they be rescued? But no other countries stepped in to help them. There was talk, but nothing more.

The fear of the future was growing in the gardens all through the city, a terror so deep that no one picked the flowers, for perhaps in this new world even that might be considered a crime.

They both got into their beds with paper and pen, but Anne was uninterested in her sister’s list of daily chores and activities, and instead decided to make her own list of all the things she wanted to do when the war was over. Visit Omi in Switzerland. Stand in a garden of white roses. Travel to Paris when the chestnut trees were blooming. See New York, especially Radio City Music Hall and the great department store Macy’s, owned by her father’s friend’s family.

Anne crept from her bed to look out into the darkness in the courtyard. She wanted to believe they could protect each other, but they were living in wolf time, a time of shadows. Most people told themselves that all would be well, but if they stayed up late, if they really thought about it, they would know that no matter who loved you, no matter who tried to protect you, nothing was fine and nothing was the same, and by the end of May, all the rabbits were gone.

At night the room filled with moths, more and more all the time, until it was so dark it was impossible to see.

The situation was changing by the day, and was worse all the time. More and more rules were passed, depriving Jews of their livelihoods and their dignity.

When she closed her eyes, there she was, somewhere in the future where she didn’t have to explain herself to anyone.

Today when they sat on the steps, Anne didn’t cry. She was learning to hold more and more of her feelings inside. Sometimes she imagined that if she didn’t let them out in some way they might burst inside her.

Anne gazed up to scan the trees. There were so few birds; something had chased them away, a sense of doom, the weight of the silence in the city. The only birds that appeared to have stayed on were the magpies, since their kind never migrated far from home. Margot pointed upward to the branches above them. “Isn’t that the bird who follows you?” Anne thought Margot was humoring her, but when she looked up, she saw that her sister was right.

Anne stood up and waved him away. She wanted him to flee to Spain or Morocco and forget all about Amsterdam. She wanted him to be somewhere safe where the bombs didn’t shake the stars in the sky. “Go on,” she called out. “Fly away now!”

You can love someone who doesn’t understand you. That’s what Anne had decided. You can trust them more than anyone else.

On this day, she felt as if she knew nothing of the world. Anything could happen. People could betray you and surprise you, they could hate you for no reason, whether or not it was fair. She sat under the clear blue sky, and there was the magpie who had followed her home. “Fly away,” she told the bird when he landed on the rooftop, but he stayed where he was, he didn’t fly away to Morocco or to Spain, and so they stayed there together, for the truth was, there was really nowhere else to go.

We were not citizens and had no rights. There was no country to escape to, none would have us, none wanted us, none came to our rescue. We could not go out at night or raise our eyes when we passed soldiers on the street corners. We could not smile or laugh in public, and if we did, our mothers hushed us and tugged on our coats.

The canals were there, and the trees, and our apartments, but the things we had taken for granted seemed like treasures to us now: books, bread, cake, aunts and uncles, cousins, a holiday, a river, a future. When we looked in the mirror, we didn’t understand why they didn’t see what we saw. Why were we considered to be so different? Were we not like them? That was when we began to wonder how much longer we would be safe.

The girls closed their eyes and wished away all that was evil. But monsters prefer silence, they delight in quiet houses and desperate people. They take whatever they want while no one says a word. They steal people’s souls and keep them in a satchel that they carry over their shoulders. That was when the younger sister realized that the monsters would be there whether or not they spoke of them.

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

listening to the BBC in London was nearly impossible. The only news that was allowed were local broadcasts controlled by the Nazis, the sort of news you couldn’t trust.

In Poland, 3.3 million Jews were residents in 1939, and by the end of the war little more than three hundred and fifty thousand survived.

Anne had not been raised as a religious Jew; she came from a modern family who had considered themselves to be German until the Nazis came to power.

Miep often allowed Anne to test the various recipes that had to be thickened with Opekta, the ingredient Pim’s company sold to ensure that homemade jam was as good as anything that had been store-bought. Many people made their own preserves now, using bruised fruit from the market or whatever grew in their own small gardens and had been saved for the winter in their cellars, kept cold in baskets or jars. Blackberry jam was Anne’s favorite.

Whenever she was left alone in her father’s office, Anne read a book if she’d brought one with her. She had begun to understand that a writer’s work was a private act, one in which the writer was in touch with the deepest portion of her soul, the part shown to no one else.

Nearly everyone complied. They were counted and numbered, they were written down in the official documents, name, age, and address. And that was it, they had become fish in a net, they were already drowning, only they didn’t know it yet. All they were told was misinformation, lies wrapped in a Nazi edict.

After all the information was written down, the authorities knew where to find the Jews, they knew how many children were in a family and what their ages were, they knew if there were old people, worthless in a work camp, they knew who lived in the nicer neighborhoods and were likely to have good silverware and jewelry. It was all written down now and kept on file, and that file was locked with a key that might as well have been made of bones. Jews were considered to be something rather than someone.

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.

She wanted to be more like Pim, who was always so positive. She mostly succeeded and went about living her life, but when the lights were out and she was in bed, she thought she still spied the black moth in the corner of her room. What kept it alive? Did it drink water from the tap in the bathroom?

Did it nest on the ceiling, so silent that their boarder passed by without noticing it? Anne raised her hand to see if the moth would come to her, but it had already disappeared. Of course she must have imagined it, she was sure of it, such creatures didn’t exist, moths were never that big, as large as a bat, they were not waiting in the closet or beneath your bed.

She was here and nowhere else. She was in her own room, in her own bed, living the one life that she had. She decided she would wait until their situation was better before she thought about the future. In the morning, the light would be bright enough to melt the snow on the window ledges, and all that had happened in the dark would seem like nothing more than a bad dream.

Rules change, they’re broken so easily it seemed they’d been made of paper or thread. Jews were attacked every day, at times when it was least expected. They were grabbed off bicycles or beaten while walking down the street.

Sometimes she didn’t even notice when a moth landed beside her. There wasn’t just one anymore and they didn’t appear only in the dark, in corners where no one bothered to look. They were everywhere now.

There was a quota of immigrants allowed into the States, regardless of their faith, and no one above that number could enter, no matter how horrifying their circumstances might be. A few years earlier, a boatload of Jewish refugees from Germany had been turned away in Havana, Cuba, and then the US government refused to allow the ship entry as well, even though many of the passengers returned to the deaths that awaited them in Europe. No country wanted Jewish refugees.

But they had no means yet to support their sister and her family, and who would pay the emigration fees, which were ridiculously high, almost five thousand dollars a person?

Her dear father, who was always so kindhearted and generous, who believed in the best in people, now couldn’t look at his own daughter for fear she’d see the truth in his eyes. She saw it anyway. Nothing was certain. “We can hope,” Pim said. No one could argue with that. Hope was all they had now.

The process was becoming more and more difficult. Soon, there were changes in US regulations that meant new paperwork.

But one night, when Anne crept downstairs, she saw that her mother and father were both in the kitchen, drinking tea and not speaking a word to each other. They were two ghosts in the same room; they were people who no longer had anything to say to each other. That was when Anne realized that there were times when silence was worse than an argument.

We were nothing to these people, not even human beings. Our fathers cried in front of us. Our mothers said we should have left long ago. But where can we go? No country will take us. No one will have us.

In the summer of 1941, Oma became seriously ill. She was pale and exhausted and often refused to eat. She insisted that nothing was wrong. “I’m fine, don’t ask me again, don’t worry about me.” But Anne could hear her grandmother moaning in the middle of the night. When no one was home, Oma sat in a chair in the dining room. She looked out the window and cried even though she knew she was too old to cry. She was a grandmother and crying should only be for children and for young brokenhearted women; still, she had her reasons.

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.

The doctor met them in the hall outside the surgery room. He had a blank expression that he had perfected during his many years of telling people bad news. He never said the word incurable, but it was there in his eyes. He was someone who had long ago realized that hope was the wrong thing to look for in this world. You needed to be brave; you needed to face whatever might come next. He sat up at nights remembering people who were no longer living. He had a notebook filled with their last words to him.

Anne wondered what people did when they lost the ones they loved most in the world. How did they ever get over their loss? Did they give up all hope or did they carry their loved ones with them, kept in their hearts?

Ninety-one Jewish children would be separated from their non-Jewish friends and associates. Anne had many friends at school but now she wondered if the ones who weren’t Jews would talk to her when they ran into each other. She’d heard of Christian students walking right past people they’d grown up with and had known all their lives without a glance, as if they were complete strangers.

There were signs everywhere. VOOR JODEN VERBODEN. “Forbidden for Jews.” The Netherlands was being divided by the Nazis’ beliefs about race, exactly as it had happened in every country the Nazis had controlled. There was a before and an after and the door to what had once been had closed.

In September, before classes began, Otto decided to bring Anne on a trip to cheer her up, for she was so worried about her grandmother that sometimes she refused to leave the house. They would be going to a hotel near two rivers where there were parks and trails where they could walk freely.

Anne was glad to have the time alone with her father. Anne and her father had more to talk about than anyone else in the family because they were readers. It was true, Anne loved him most. His kindness, his love of books, those times when she could tell he was thinking that she was special.

Jews were blamed for every disease and disaster that occurred; people said they secretly murdered Christian children, that they couldn’t be trusted and weren’t truly human.

she saw the black moth every time darkness fell. It followed her up the stairs into her rented room, then disappeared from sight. She told herself it was a figment of her imagination, made up of shadows and fear, but why then could she hear its wings flutter, why was it in the corner of every room?

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.

It was then that she saw something she’d never expected. She saw that her mother would do anything for her, that she would search the world over for her if Anne fell into the underworld; she would make the trees turn brown and shake them with all her might until they lost their leaves, she would scour the whole world until she found her daughter. They didn’t get along, but it wasn’t because they were opposites, rather because they were so alike. Anne wondered if her mother was giving her the necklace because there might not be time to do so if she waited until Anne was eighteen.