Anne Frank: The Authorized Graphic Biography

Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography
by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon
Hill and Wang, 2010

Genre: Graphic Novel, Biography Non-Fiction

Honors:

• Booklist 10/15/10
• Kirkus Reviews 07/15/10
• Library Journal starred 01/01/11
• Publishers Weekly 09/27/10
• School Library Journal starred 03/01/11

Review: The collected accounts of friends, relatives, and those who helped the Frank family hide in an annex behind Otto Frank's business are re-told using visual depictions based on photographs of Anne Frank, her sister, mother, and father, and the four others who hid with them from the Nazi Germans during World War II. This graphic novel is not your typical manga or cartoon: the story is based on true events, and the narrative boxes surrounding the pictures are meant to tell the history of events that brought about the capture and deportation of Jews like Anne and her family and those that influenced Anne to aspire to journalism, beginning with the autobiographical account of her life in hiding. The story comes from entries in Anne's diary, leading up until the fateful day when an unknown person working at Otto Frank's business discovered the secret passage to the annex and sold the information to the police, and once the family is separated the story relies upon the stories of other survivors of the concentration camps who were in contact with one or more of the members of the Frank family.

Opinion: I remember hearing about Anne Frank, and the Holocaust, as a child, and then learning about her fate when a made-for-tv movie was shown on one of the major network stations many years ago. The movie was very difficult to watch, with graphic depictions of Jews being violently separated, stripped, shaved and tatooed, starved, and gassed, and then left to die. This novel tells almost the same story, but the images are a little easier to bear as they are true to events but not as dynamic as video footage. I was moved at the way the story was told, with third-person narratives accompanied by pictures with speech and thought bubbles conveying the spirit of the moment in the narration. It puts readers directly into the shoes of Anne, Margo, Peter and his parents, and Other and Edith Frank. It is also difficult to follow the deterioration of the Frank family as they are separated and starved, being drawn with shaven heads and appearing almost skeletal compared with the full-figured and colorful drawings of them that appear during the time of hiding.

Ideas: I am pegging this book as a must for anyone who is planning on teaching about the Holocaust. Anne Frank's published diary is well known and appreciated, and I don't mean to undermine the usefulness of reading the diary, but it is a lot easier to identify with her story, PLUS the history of events that occurred in Germany after the stock market crash and Hitler's rise to dictatorship and the many battles that led to the surrender of Italy and Germany so close to the time in which Anne dies, in this surprisingly smart format.