When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary
Written by Alice Hoffman
Scholastic Press, New York, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-338-85694-1
Review by Kristin Clarke
It’s unusual to start a book knowing the ending—and an unhappy one at that. But award-winning author Alice Hoffman successfully blends both her rich imagination and her prodigious historical research to craft a coming-of-age journey about a girl whose tragic life we all think we know.
This is as far from Hoffman’s most-recognized books—Practical Magic, Aquamarine, and 30-odd others—as her fans might imagine, but the author’s notable passion for her characters and love of family remain just as core to her latest storytelling.
Written for ages 8 to 12, the 304-page book is a worthy addition to any libraries for grades three to seven. However, adult readers—especially those concerned about America’s own decline into book banning, increased antisemitism and discrimination, and the societal toll of extreme politics—also will find this juvenile fiction particularly poignant and relevant in today’s climate.
In When We Flew Away, Hoffman starts her novel in Amsterdam pre-1940, before the German invasion of the Netherlands. Tapping archival information from the Anne Frank House and Straus Historical Society, she captures the disruption and fears surrounding Anne Frank and her family over three years of growing Nazi aggression.
Hoffman shows Anne to be a smart, mischievous 10-year-old eager to mature into an independent actress or writer living in California. Having fled to perceived safety in the Netherlands with her father, Otto; mother, Edith; and “perfect” older sister, Margot, she increasingly fears for that future as a desperate Otto reaches out to powerful American friends and others for help securing visas to Cuba and eventual passage to the United States.
The build-up to the family’s eventual decision to hide on the top two floors of Otto’s office building is slow and insidious. The characters move from happy school days, bike riding, and canal ice skating to food shortages, soldier patrols, stripped rights, seized property, lethally enforced curfews, and finally, deportation of Jewish men—and eventually women and children—to “work camps” of no return.
The carefully paced progression is heartbreaking, especially blended with Anne’s natural optimism and hope. Friends stop speaking to the family, join Nazi youth groups, and start echoing the hatred brought from afar. The girls are forced to change schools, witness the declining health of their beloved grandmother as medical access diminishes, and transition their days to a confusing and terrifying order.
In the Franks’ case, however, Otto’s non-Jewish professional colleagues refused to give in to the enmity, taking great personal risks to help prepare, move, and sustain the family when the Franks had to hide. Among the latter’s sparse belongings: Anne’s diary with her daily, still-hopeful entries until the family’s discovery in August 1944 by Dutch police and a Nazi officer.
Hoffman takes time to talk to her young readers in an afterword, explaining that the book is “both a warning and a blessing” and that character dialogue, feelings, and daily activities are fictional but based on “pieces of history.” She notes that the profound experience of reading The Diary of a Young Girl at age 12—20 years after Anne’s death at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp–instilled a determination to become a writer herself.
“Despite the cruel ending of her life at age 15, her diary helped me to see that even when there was evil in the world, even when it was impossible to have hope, it is still possible to be brave,” Hoffman notes. “It was possible not to be forgotten and to live on in what you had written. It was possible to have a dream.”
