Anne Frank

I bought this for my daughter's recent 10th birthday. She had been asking questions about the Holocaust and I thought the best way to answer was to give her an "introduction", so to speak. She has not put this book down in over a week -- she brings it with her everywhere, along with a few other books on random subjects.....so is the short attention span of a 10-year-old. Who can better get the attention of a young girl, than something written by another young girl, right? This book will whet her appetite for future class assignments on the subject in years to come.

"I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart." ~Anne Frank The DK Biography of Anne Frank is a combination of her life and the setting in which she lived. Kem Knapp Sawyer explores Anne Frank's life in Amsterdam and then shows how her life changed as she was forced to hide in the secret annex. She explains the frustrations Anne felt as she was locked in just a few rooms and how her emotions often overwhelmed her and how her situations brought on depression. Anne Frank's story has always fascinated me because it represents the risks human beings will take to protect the innocent and it also shows how individuals can endure great hardship in order to see a new day of freedom. Through her diary we can understand the world of a child hiding from death itself. There are pictures of the diary, pictures of the large bookcase that concealed the entrance to the hiding place and what Anne could see from the attic window. The author also explains how there are three versions of Anne's diary and how her diary was eventually published with original and revised diary entries. As the author notes, we can't always escape suffering and cruelty, but we can try. ~The Rebecca Review