Review and Giveaway: Treasures from the Attic

Treasures from the Attic: The Extraordinary Story of Anne Frank’s Family

Author: Mirjam Pressler

Translator: Damion Searls

Hardcover: 416 pages (also available in Kindle and audio formats)

Publisher: Doubleday (April 19, 2011)

Synposis:

Helene Elias, born Helene Frank and sister of Otto Frank, left the house she inherited from her mother to her only surviving son upon her death. It was a house Otto Frank and his family, including daughter Anne Frank the young author of The Diary of a Young Girl, had visited many times before World War II. Many different relatives of Anne Frank lived in the house in the years preceding and following the war. When Helene’s only living son, Buddy Elias, inherited the house his wife Gertrude discovered in the attic a record of the family in photographs, letters, postcards, official documents, drawings and poems…over 6,000 pieces of the Frank family history. The most significant of these documents were used to trace the history of the family from the mid-1800s to the present day.

Review:

I would guess that a good percentage of the world knows who Anne Frank was, the young Jewish girl who wrote a diary while in hiding in the Netherlands during World War II before her death in a concentration camp. But what do we know about her mother, father, sister? What were they like before that brief time period we’re all familiar with? What were they like in peacetime? Even more what do we know about the family members who wondered helplessly what had become of this family when they seemed to disappear off the face of the Earth? Where did the Frank family come from?

This combination of photographs, reproduced letters, and narrative weaving all the documents together creates the story of a family. A happy family, for the most part. Something most of us have never thought of when considering the Frank family. We learn about their beginnings, their professions, their relationships, their losses. This book sketches a more complete picture of the Anne Frank and makes her loss, as well as the loss of everyone sent to a concentration camp even more tragic. You can picture all the family members touched by the deaths, their fear and even their guilt.

The victims of the camps become not just one of nameless millions but happy people. This book shows the families before the war, shows their normal everyday lives and then how life went on after the war and the losses. Normal everyday life…but not quite. This book was fascinating and showed me an aspect of World War II I had never glimpsed before.

Thanks to Doubleday I can give away TWO copies of Treasures from the Attic. Just leave a comment below. The Frank family–spread throughout Europe and America–used letters to keep in touch about the good and the bad, birthdays and weddings, every event of their lives. When was the last time you wrote a letter (email doesn’t count!) to a family member?