When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of religious discrimination, graphic violence, illness and death, and physical abuse.

Even before World War II, Jewish refugees had long sought safety in the Netherlands. As Chapter 1 discusses, “[t]he Netherlands had been a refuge for Jews following the Inquisitions in Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th centuries. It was a place rooted in equality, where much of the Jewish population was given full civil rights in 1796, allowed to live freely in a city that was both mysterious and practical, a world made of ice in the winter and of tulips in the spring” (7). The nation, neutral in European political matters, appealed to Jewish people in Germany and other countries in which the Nazi party’s influence grew in the early 20th century; by 1941, the number of Jewish people in Amsterdam was over 79 thousand, about 10 percent recent immigrants like the Franks.

Despite its neutrality, the Netherlands could not avoid conflict as Adolf Hitler sought to conquer more and more of Europe. After invading on May 10, 1940, German forces quickly overtook the government and established an occupation government, events realistically depicted in the novel. Germany imposed a civil occupying regime in the Netherlands as opposed to a military one; they wanted to convince most citizens of the Netherlands to accept Nazism through rules, propaganda, and encouragement.