Anne Frank: Silent Witnesses, Reminders of a Jewish Girl’s Life

Jansen, motivated to write about Anne Frank because “time is running out for people who knew Anne to tell the story,” delivers a well-researched and at times jarring record of the places where she lived before her untimely death in 1944 at age 15. Statistics, such as that 102,000 of the 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands did not survive the war, are interspersed with descriptions of mundane events from Frank’s life, to sobering effect. Jansen employs long passages from Frank’s diary to connect the reader to his own accounts of the places Frank describes, including the house in Amsterdam where her family hid during the early years of the war and the streets where she saw the Nazis rounding up Jews. This work is best suited as a scholarly companion to Anne’s own diary. [em](BookLife) [/em]