51 pages • 1 hour read
Alice HoffmanWhen We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: The Nazi Occupation of the Netherlands
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of religious discrimination, graphic violence, illness and death, and physical abuse.
Even before World War II, Jewish refugees had long sought safety in the Netherlands. As Chapter 1 discusses, “[t]he Netherlands had been a refuge for Jews following the Inquisitions in Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th centuries. It was a place rooted in equality, where much of the Jewish population was given full civil rights in 1796, allowed to live freely in a city that was both mysterious and practical, a world made of ice in the winter and of tulips in the spring” (7). The nation, neutral in European political matters, appealed to Jewish people in Germany and other countries in which the Nazi party’s influence grew in the early 20th century; by 1941, the number of Jewish people in Amsterdam was over 79 thousand, about 10 percent recent immigrants like the Franks.
Despite its neutrality, the Netherlands could not avoid conflict as Adolf Hitler sought to conquer more and more of Europe. After invading on May 10, 1940, German forces quickly overtook the government and established an occupation government, events realistically depicted in the novel. Germany imposed a civil occupying regime in the Netherlands as opposed to a military one; they wanted to convince most citizens of the Netherlands to accept Nazism through rules, propaganda, and encouragement. But for Jewish people it was different: Austrian Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi lawyer in charge of the Netherlands’ new state, immediately established laws that limited Jewish rights. Jewish civil servants and university teachers were fired. Any unrest was forcefully put down. As time went on, the occupying forces took away possessions and businesses from Jewish people.
Then violence drastically increased: In February 1941, hundreds of Jewish people in Amsterdam were deported to Buchenwald, a concentration camp; most were later murdered at the death camp Mauthausen. Protests and a strike among workers followed, but the Nazis quelled these easily. More Jewish residents were sent to camps in the following years—shockingly, by the tens of thousands. For example, in 1942, Jewish men already sent to work camps within the Netherlands and their families (more than 12,000 people) were sent to Auschwitz. As a result of misinformation campaigns, the complete takeover of the government, and strategies for isolating Jewish people, the Nazis deported and murdered a higher percentage of Jewish people from the Netherlands than from other countries in Western Europe such as France or Belgium. (“Amsterdam.” Holocaust Encyclopedia; “The Netherlands: The Highest Number of Jewish Victims in Western Europe.” Anne Frank House).
Facing deportation to camps, many Jewish people in Amsterdam attempted to hide within the city, the Franks among them. According to the statistics at the Anne Frank House, out of the approximately 28,000 who hid, about a third—including the Franks—were caught. Amsterdam was not freed from occupation until May 1945.
Literary Context: Connections to The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Annelies Marie Frank was born on June 12, 1929. In 1942, for her 13th birthday, Anne received a blank journal with a red plaid cover and began using it as a diary. Less than a month later, the threat of Anne’s sister Margot’s deportation to a forced labor camp prompted Otto and Edith Frank to move up their family’s planned disappearance. On July 6, they entered the small rooms on the upper floors of the building annexed to Otto Frank’s spice business at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. They shared the tiny rooms with a family of three, the van Pels, and later, a man named Fritz Pfeffer. The Franks did not leave the “secret annex” until it was raided on August 4, 1944.
When the Franks were found, the four family members were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Edith later died. In November 1944, Anne and Margot were taken to Bergen-Belsen. Overcrowding and disease killed tens of thousands there, and it is supposed that Margot and Anne Frank died of typhus in February or March 1945.
While Anne hid in the “secret annex,” she continued her diary. A talented writer with mature storytelling intuition, she first describes the backstory and given circumstances that prompted the family’s hiding. Consequently, from Anne’s early entries, readers are privy to one of the most important eyewitness accounts of the worsening oppression and persecution of Jewish people during the Holocaust, along with the difficulties endured by those hiding. Simultaneously, the diary exists as an intimate account of Anne’s emotions, goals, and relationships.
Anne learned in the annex that writings documenting the war might be published; consequently, as any good writer would, she began revising earlier passages from her diary in case others might someday read it. She provided pseudonyms for the van Pels (renamed the van Daans) and Pfeffer (renamed Albert Dussel). Otto Frank survived his imprisonment at Auschwitz and collected the journal and Anne’s revisions to compile the work eventually originally published. Commonly regarded as one of the most impactful coming-of-age nonfiction works in literature, The Diary of a Young Girl has been translated into more than 60 languages and is studied by scholars and schoolchildren alike.
When We Flew Away draws on Anne’s diary in several ways. Many details are historically accurate, from the gifts Anne receives for her 13th birthday to her cat’s name to the hiding plan crafted with the van Pels. Much of Anne’s story and character, while the author’s invention, is guided by the historical Anne’s traits and goals as evidenced in the diary. Also, with its consistent use of dramatic irony, When We Flew Away echoes the terrible historical irony in Anne’s real-life story: After years of anticipating the arrival of help and freedom, Anne died within months of Bergen-Belsen’s liberation. She was 15 years old.
When We Flew Away joins other works about Anne and her diary such as The Diary of Anne Frank: A Play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, the nonfiction biography Anne Frank by Melissa Müller, and a nonfiction autobiography by Miep Gies called Anne Frank Remembered. Other middle grade novels set during Nazi occupations include Uri Orlev’s The Island on Bird Street and Lois Lowry’s 1990 Newbery Medal winner for children’s literature Number the Stars.
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By Alice Hoffman
