(New York) With the cooperation of the Anne Frank House, a novel based on the girl’s life just before she began keeping a diary will be published in September by children’s publisher Scholastic.
Bestselling author Alice Hoffman will release When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary on September 17.
The project was initiated by Scholastic editors Lisa Sandell and Miriam Farbey, who believed Hoffman would be the ideal author to tell the story. Hoffman is known for Practical Magic and other witchcraft fiction, but she also wrote children’s books and a novel, The World That We Knew, about the Nazi persecution of Jews.
In a statement, Hoffman testified that The Diary of Anne Frank had a profound impact on her when she was 12 and “that it changed the way she saw the world and changed the person she was and that she would become “.
“I wondered what Anne’s life was like before the diary and what led her to become the writer whose voice spoke for the entire generation of those whose lives were ruined or destroyed by the Nazi occupation , a voice that will never allow us to forget what happened,” she recounted.
Hoffman drew on archives, including some provided by the Anne Frank House, to write about the Netherlands in the early 1940s, after the Nazi invasion. In July 1942, a month after the 13-year-old started her diary, the Frank family hid in the annex of her father’s office building in Amsterdam.
She continued writing until August 1944, when the family was discovered by the Nazis. Anne and her sister Margot were eventually deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died in 1945. Their father, Otto, was the only member of the family to survive the war.
Anne Frank’s diary was discovered by Miep Gies, an employee of Otto Frank who had helped the family while they were in hiding. After the war, she passed the diary to Otto Frank, who first published it in Dutch in 1947. Since then, The Diary of Anne Frank has been translated into dozens of languages and sold millions of times. exemplary.