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

by Alice Hoffman

They stared at each other and then for the first time Edith told her daughter the truth, holding nothing back. “I think you are a storyteller,” she said. “Perhaps you will turn out to be a writer.” Anne carried what her mother had said inside her heart; she carried it everywhere she went because she knew it was true. She’d known it even before her mother had said so. She would be a writer.

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.

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. You are not us. We can tell who you are even when you are halfway down the street. We can cross over, call you names, spit if we please.

she forgot everything when she was in the middle of a book. The rest of the world disappeared. The signs forbidding Jews to enter parks, the gardens they weren’t allowed to enter. She was someplace else. She was far from here in a place that had no name. The only difference between reading and being with Hello was that this time they were in this together and she wasn’t alone. They had been to another place where no one could reach them, but they had been there together.

“What does it mean? Darling, it means I would do anything for you. That’s what love is.”

All that Anne knew was that every morning Hello was waiting for her at the bicycle shed, and they walked and talked as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. Perhaps that was what it meant to be in love. For a little while at least it was possible to forget everyone else.

At last, it was the best day of the year, Anne’s birthday, June 12.

This was the birthday that meant she was no longer a child, not that she had felt like one for some time, but this day made it official. Thirteen was a mystical and magical number. Love and unity were said to equal thirteen, a lucky number. But the truth was, nothing was lucky anymore. Starting the next month, at least one hundred seven thousand Jews began to be deported from the Netherlands to death camps such as Auschwitz so that more than 75 percent of all Jews in the country would be murdered by the end of the war.

“You knew just the right present!” Anne cried as she opened the diary to the first blank page. It was perfect. Maybe she could be a writer after all.

She wished that she and Hello lived in another time, and that they could go to the sea and find a boat and disappear to someplace brand new, somewhere where they could do as they pleased. She longed for a future they could make for themselves, one in which the bombs had never fallen. She wished they could be anywhere else but here. Sitting there, among her friends, Anne had the feeling that no one knew her, and that she’d never truly had a friend in her life.

If anything, turning thirteen had made Anne feel more alone. She had thought it would change everything for the better, but it hadn’t. She felt as if she was now supposed to know what she should do with her life, but given the way the world was, she couldn’t see the possibilities of what her future might be.

She knew what her Oma’s answer would be if she asked what she should do now that she was thirteen and no longer a child. Enjoy every day, live it as if it were your last, don’t think too much about the future or the past, run to meet the boy who is waiting for you in the square, read every book you can, write every night, look at the moonlight, do all that you can to stay alive.

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.”

It was the day they would disappear into the place where the birds went to hide in the treetops. That’s where the magpies were, high in the tallest trees, so far away they couldn’t be seen.

The future was a mystery until you were standing right inside it. You could only see it clearly when you looked backward. Now they saw everything that had led to this day. The signs, the stars, the rules, the vanishing of every part of their lives except their love for one another.

“We’ll come back,” he insisted, but Anne could tell from the tone of his voice. He might have believed all would be well once upon a time, but now he wasn’t sure. Anything could happen. The whole world could disappear, and where would one cat be then? Where would their family be, falling through the darkness into the underworld, holding on to one another as best they could? And then they left, just as her mother had promised they would.

Anne was not allowed to say goodbye to anyone; it was too dangerous. She merely vanished.

The day when everything changed for her wasn’t the day when the bombs fell, or the day when the queen disappeared, or the day when the books were taken off the shelves. It wasn’t the day when Jews were no longer allowed to sit on park benches or enter public buildings or the day when they had to wear yellow stars on their coats. 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.

She felt a pain in her chest, and each breath was difficult. She wanted the life she’d had. She wanted the world to stay the same. She wanted good to win over evil and monsters to be trapped and kept locked up in chains.

But before all that, before she looked at the room where she would sleep for the next two years, before she wondered if anything was ever fair, before she lost everyone she had ever loved or mourned for, before she thought of the stars in the sky she would never see, before she wept over the future that was waiting for them, before she took out her diary, she turned and closed the door.

Love is everything, love is everywhere, it’s the one thing they can never take away from you.

Anne perished at the age of fifteen in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp soon after her sister, Margot, died, approximately two months before British forces liberated the camp.

Holocaust, from the Greek, holokauston, an offering consumed by fire.

In the year when I was twelve, I discovered many of the books that have meant the most to me, books that changed my life. This is true for many of us. At twelve, we are becoming the adult readers we will one day be, and hopefully, it is a time when we have the freedom to walk into a library or a bookstore and choose any book we wish to read.

The book that affected me more than any other was The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank. It changed the way I looked at the world. It changed the person I was and the person I would become. I read the diary in 1964. It was only twenty years after Anne Frank was murdered by the Nazis at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and yet I had heard very little about the Holocaust and the systematic genocide of the Jews in Europe.

My father never spoke about fighting at the front in France, or the traumas he experienced there. The generation that had seen the atrocities of World War II wanted to protect their children from the reality of the brutality of the war.