Ruud van der Rol

I would use this book as a way to introduce my class to Anne Frank, before reading The Diary of a Young Girl. Anne Frank Beyond the Diary is a quintessential collection of source material that creates the world of 1940s Europe. It has everything that one might look for when studying a subject in depth: scans from the diary, scans of Anne’s fiction writing, photographs of the secret hiding place, family photographs, Nazi documents, maps, newspaper clippings, postcards, et cetera. It moves show more along more or less chronologically. With asides that give the reader insights into what was happening to the society outside of the Secret Annex. It would be a great companion to the diary. Ideally if the kids are reading the diary in their Language Arts class, they could be reading Beyond the Diary in a Social Studies class. show less

How it broke my heart to see an image of the red-checked cover of Anne's famous diary. It's so very sad that so much ephemera survives the girl who disappeared into the maw of Hitler's war machine.

Reading Anne's diary when I was a girl left me feeling like a citizen of the world, a person with the opportunity to choose to be one of the people who were really good at heart. It felt like something that I could do for her, back when I was a romantic young teen myself. I knew that I could never show more be part of any religion that believed that all others can go only to hell. And I have never changed my mind about that. show less

This books succeeds by constantly putting the human faces in front of us as it retells the story of the Frank family, the Van Pels, and Pfeffer in hiding.

This photographic remembrance of Anne Frank appears at first like any family album. Translated from the Dutch, this photobiography, like the famous diary, captures the ordinariness of Anne and her family's life. Individual photos are mostly informal snapshots and are a bit blurry at times. But this photobiography chronicles a far-from-ordinary life, and the Association of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam sets Anne's story in a larger context, examining Hitler's rise to power, developing her show more family history, and the larger fate of the Jews during WWII. The establishment of the Anne Frank House in 1960 is also described.
The photographs are well captioned and the book is handsomely designed, with short essays in easily readable text. A facsimile of her last diary entry has also been included, as well as maps, interviews, chronology, and notes on different versions of her famous diary. This is a poignant, respectful tribute to Anne Frank. show less