Anne Frank and Me

Summary:

                Anne Frank and Me by Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld was a wonderful read. It was about a girl named Nicole who is learning about the Holocaust and Anne Frank in one of her classes. She doesn’t really appreciate the entire situation, because she can not even begin to imagine what the Jews were going through. She goes on a school field trip to a Holocaust museum and there is a shooting there. The book implies that she is shot and everything goes blank. All of a sudden, she is then thrust into a world much different than her own a. One moment she was a regular teenager girl with a blog complaining how ordinary her life was, and the next she is a Jewish girl in Paris in the year 1927. The rest of the book goes on to describe her experience that is very similar to Anne Frank. They are eventually taken away into an internment camp, where they meet the real Anne Frank herself.  Anne goes one way and they go another; Nicole and her little sister, Elizabeth, are forced into a chamber. Nicole again wakes up back in the future. She now has a new found appreciation of what the others went to, and there is even a scene in which she attends a funeral of a Holocaust victim she met in her “dream”. At the funeral, there is a note she herself wrote while she was in the dream and it was preserved. This makes her question, was it all a dream or did she just truly experience the life of Nicole Bernhardt, the Jewish girl living through the Holocaust?

Teachability:

Anne Frank and Me was a wonderful book that I would love to teach to my students someday. I could not put the book down. It had very deep, provoking issues, and it was so intriguing that I was interested the entire novel. Yes, it is a tad long and some of the scenes are hard to handle, but I think it is definitely a topic that needs to be taught. I think it would be good for eighth or ninth graders, because the vocabulary is not too difficult, but some of the scenes are for a more mature reader. It focuses on the Holocaust and the different conflicts with the allies. It goes into a historical view, by bringing up how every country was treated differently and some Jews were much worse off than others. I think this would be a great book to teach while the students learn about it in Social Studies, because there are so many things in the book that are important to the history of the Holocaust. They mention places such as Auschwitz and the Vel d’ Hiv roundup (the place in which the Germans kept all of the Jews located in France), which are very things I did not even know about. It is also written in a gender-neutral way, so I think that is a positive aspect. Also, it is set in modern times at first including blog posts and website posts, making it relatable to students these days. At times, The Diary of Anne Frank can drag on a tad, so this novel brings together an important story from the past and brings it to modern times so that children can appreciate it that much more.