Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
Anne Frank: A Photographic Story of a Life
Nonfiction
For ages 10 and up
Dorling Kindersley, 2004 ISBN: 978-0756603410
There is no doubt that Anne Frank is one of the most famous young writers of our times. Thanks to the diary that Anne wrote we are able to see what it was like to be a young Jewish girl caught up in the horrors that were sweeping over WWII Europe. We can understand how truly terrible it was to fear for ones life at every turn. At the same time, Anne wrote about the simple things, about her feelings as she grew into womanhood, about her relationships with her family.
Anne?s family was living in Amsterdam in Holland when it became evident that she and her family were in mortal danger of being taken away by the feared Gestapo. The family had already fled from Germany, trying to get away from the Nazi regime there and the terrible messages that the German leader, Adolf Hitler, was giving his people. Hitler felt that it was his duty to eliminate all the Jews in Europe. In his twisted mind, the Jews, gypsies and other "non-Aryan" people needed to be removed from society.
Luckily for Anne, her sister Margot, her parents, and the van Pels family, a Dutch family was willing to hide them from the Gestapo until things got better. Thus it was that Anne went to live in hiding in what was called "the annex." Cramped, with little privacy and with boredom dogging them at every turn, the two families did their best to build a new life for themselves hidden behind a wall and cut off from the world.
In this newest addition to the DK photographic biography series we are able to explore Anne?s life, right from the time she was born, to the day when she died of typhus at the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen. In addition we are able to seen what an impression her diary made on the world, and how hers was a voice which will never be silenced.
