Anne Frank was born on 12 June 1929. She died in Bergen-Belsen, three months short of her sixteenth birthday.
Gr 5 Up-Anyone who has been touched by Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl will be moved by this account that opens on the day Anne received the journal for her 13th birthday. The color photo of the diary set opposite the text lends immediacy and a sense of reality to the commentary. The feelings are reinforced throughout by the authors' prodigious research and the accumulation of details through the photographs. Some of the pictures included have never been published before, and their lengthy captions describe not only who is in the photos, but also the circumstances under which they were taken. Framed pages expand on the political and economical situations of the time. The well-written main narrative, which uses aptly chosen quotations from the diary, takes readers from Anne's normal, happy childhood through the years in the Secret Annex to the betrayal and Anne's death from typhus in Bergen-Belsen just months before her 16th birthday and only weeks before the liberation of the camp. For readers the loss is double. One feels the personal loss of a bright, fun-loving, and talented individual who might have made a difference in the world and also remembers that many Anne Franks died during that nightmarish period.- Amy Kellman, The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
Since the original Dutch publication of Diary of a Young Girl in 1947, Anne Frank has become an international symbol, variously representing the innocence of youth, the fate of Jewish children under Nazi persecution, and hope and faith in the face of hatred (``In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart''). With its combination of family photographs (many reproduced here for the first time), biographical sketches of Anne Frank and the others in the ``Secret Annex,'' and brief essays identifying specific stages of the Holocaust, this astonishing book moves past symbolism to disentangle the real Anne Frank from mythography. Van der Rol and Verhoeven, who work at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, focus sharply on the facts about Anne Frank's life--and death. They document the Frank family's odyssey from Germany to Holland, locate a farewell postcard Anne sent just before going into hiding, display Anne's roughly written diary entries, and quote those who saw her before she died in Bergen Belsen. Sidebars and interpolated passages set her experiences against a broader historical backdrop, explaining major developments of WW II with maps and photographs as well as text. They also discuss the general issue of Jews' going into hiding in Holland: photographs of very cramped hiding places contrast with pictures and maps showing the Franks' relatively spacious quarters; children are shown going into hiding without their parents; a receipt indicates bounty paid to someone who turned Jews over to the Nazis. A superb exploration of the particular and the universal meanings of a seminal work. BOMC selection. Ages 10-up. (Sept.)
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