The Tree in the Courtyard: Looking Through Anne Frank's Window

Anne Frank told for young audiences. Cool to show how one's legacy lives on in the form of trees planted all around the world.

This book is about Anne Frank's experience living inside her attic and staring at the world outside through her window. A tree begins to grow in the courtyard below and she keeps note of it in her diary. This book is written very poetically, and teaches kids to look at the world around them to find

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the extraordinary aspects of life that may be overlooked. Anne's captive state causes her to examine ordinary things, such as a tree growing, and see them with curiosity and wonder. The art work is charcoal sketches, similar to what Anne might have made in her own diary. I like this book because it could open up a discussion about science, or prompt a history lesson on Anne Frank and why she was living inside of her attic.

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This was a beautiful book. It told Anne Frank's story from the Chestnut Tree's perspective, and I loved the part about how the seeds from the tree have been planted all over the world in remembrance.

As the author recounts in an Afterword, during World War II, Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis in the rear annex of her father’s factory in Amsterdam. The Nazis were intent on deporting and killing all the Jews they could find. Ann and her family were kept alive by several of her

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father’s factory workers. But the Nazis finally found them on August 4, 1944, and Anne died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March, 1945, three weeks before that camp was liberated by the forces fighting the Nazis.

A woman who was helping the Frank family, Miep Gies, went into the annex after the Nazis came and collected Anne’s notebooks and diary. When the war ended, Anne’s father Otto was the only survivor from the annex, and Gies returned the diary to him. He arranged for it to be published, and it was translated into seventy languages.

Incidents reported in the diary appear in this book, told from the point of view of the huge horse chestnut tree which Anne could see from the attic window.

The tree collapsed and died in 2010, the year Anne Frank would have turned eight-one had she lived. Saplings from it were planted all over the world. The author writes:

“Just like the girl, she passed into history.
Just like the girl, she lives on.”

Brown ink drawings on a white background by Peter McCarty help convey the solemn tone of the story.

The text of the book itself doesn’t give any specifics about the Holocaust, or what happened to its victims, or how many died.

In spite of its lack of details and focus on the tree, this book has won a number of awards, including New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book 2016, New York Public Library Best Book for Kids, 2016, and Sidney Taylor Award notable title, 2017. I would argue that readers could use a bit more clarification.

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