Anne Frank: Life in Hiding

Anne Frank: Life in Hiding
by Johanna Hurwitz, illustrated by Vera Rosenberry Jewish Publication Society Young Biography Philadelphia, 1988, 62 pp. $10.95.

Why write a biography, when Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl is so eloquent, spirited and accessible to young readers?

In telling this story in the third person and the past tense, Johanna Hurwitz successfully places the personal story of Anne Frank in the historical context of the terrible facts of the Holocaust. In a painterly way, Hurwitz has extracted and reproduced the colors and concrete details of the life in hiding Anne depicted in her letters to “Kitty.” The book is enhanced by the illustrations of Vera Rosenberry, and the inclusion of a map of Europe, a list of important dates, and an index.

For a next generation of readers — whose world will still be very much affected by the Holocaust in ways which we have yet to fathom completely — the story of Anne Frank’s tragic end as one of the millions of innocent victims of the Nazis is an essential volume of inheritance.