(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 publish the book on September 17 When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary.
The project was initiated by Scholastic editors-in-chief 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 fictions on witchcraft, but she has also written children’s books and a novel, The World That We Knowabout the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis.
In a press release, Hoffman testifies that The Diary of Anne Frank had had a profound impact on her when she was 12 and “changed the way she saw the world and changed the person she was and 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 said.
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 to write 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 handed the journal over to Otto Frank, who published it for the first time in Dutch in 1947. Since then, The Diary of Anne Frank has been translated into dozens of languages and sold millions of copies.