The story of Anne Frank is one of the most well known in the world — even for people who have never read The Diary Of A Young Girl, visited the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam or Bergen-Belsen, where Anne and her sister Margot perished. And yet, little has been written about the years before Anne began keeping her diaries in the attic in the Summer of 1942. A prolific fiction writer, Alice Hoffman (The Dovekeeper; Aquarmarine; Practical Magic) calls upon her background as a storyteller to capture the open-hearted spirit of the Anne found in those pages.
The young Anne of the novel is a dreamer, reader, a little selfish and stubborn. She’s often at odds with her mother, admiring her sister’s beauty and good behavior, and is her father Pim’s (his nickname) favorite. She was, as Hoffman writes, someone who “always thought bigger than anyone else.” Among her friends and classmates, she’s funny, chatty and exuberant, the center of attention, with a certain light drawing them to her.
This Anne is charmed by the birds she sees, in particular the special magpie she believes follows her. She wishes to hurry up and grow older so that she, like them, can fly away, maybe to California. Later, after the Nazis invade the Netherlands in May 1940 and everything changes for the country literally overnight, laws are passed over the months that forbid Jews from owning businesses, cars or bikes; even ice skating is outlawed. Anne and Margot’s mother, Edith, is afraid to dry their linens outside for too long for fear the Germans, or even the envious Dutch citizens, will see the nice things and wonder what else they might have worth confiscating. Anne’s wish grows to one where she hopes all of the Jews in her complex and the rest of the country are able to fly away.
Hoffman, who heavily researched the period and wrote the book in cooperation with the Anne Frank House, paints a vivid picture of what Amsterdam was like for the Jewish population and the desperation and bad luck that befell the Franks, the Van Pel family and Fritz Pfeffer (all of whom hid together, assisted by Miep and Jan Gies, and others). The Franks were financially in a better position than many, and one needed to be with emigration fees as high as $5K/person. They also had Edith’s brothers in the US who could sponsor them, and Otto knew influential Jewish Americans, like his friend Nathan Straus, Jr., a Macy’s scion. But with America and Europe’s refusals to allow in refugees, the missed chance to send the girls to England, and the visa waiting list at the US consulate in Rotterdam destroyed when the Nazis’ bombed the city, they and others like them were left with almost no options. “By the War’s end, the Netherlands would have the greatest percentage of Jews murdered of any Western European country”.
It’s of course unavoidably painful to read When We Flew Away, and not think about what we know is to come. But Hoffman skillfully portrays the time before, in both its ordinariness and joyful moments, like when Anne has a little romance with her friend’s cousin, Hello Silberberg, and the happiness still to be had. Hoffman makes her and the Franks into real people, more than emblems or victims of the cruelty and randomness of the Nazis.
