The Anne Frank House’s educational efforts to increase awareness of the holocaust and its aftermath include the production of two graphic novels: The Search and A Family Secret. Farrar Straus Giroux has recently published American editions of these graphic novels, and has also created a teacher’s guide to accompany them.

A Family Secret and The Search are both written with younger readers in mind, using straightforward language, appealing visuals and youthful characters who are easy to identify with to depict the experiences of two families in Holland during World War II. The young women who come of age during World War II are reunited many years later by their grandsons, giving both stories a multi-generational context.

In A Family Secret (ISBN: 978-0-374-32271-7), while searching his grandmother's attic for likely items to sell at a yard sale, Jeroen finds a photo album that brings back hard memories for his grandmother, Helena. Helena tells Jeroen for the first time about her experiences during the German occupation of the Netherlands during the Second World War, and mourns the loss of her Jewish best friend, Esther. Helena believes that her own father, a policeman and Nazi sympathizer, delivered Esther to the Nazis and that she died in a concentration camp. But after hearing her story, Jeroen makes a discovery and Helena realizes that her father kept an important secret from her.

In The Search (ISBN: 978-0-374-46455-4), Esther remembers her own experience of the Holocaust as a Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, and recounts to her grandson Daniel and his friend Jeroen how she escaped from the Nazis and survived by going into hiding in the countryside. Her parents were not so lucky. Esther knows they were sent to a concentration camp and died there, and with Daniel's help she embarks on a search to discover what happened to them during the last months of their lives. After tracking down an old friend who now lives in Israel, Esther finally learns the shocking story of how her parents met their fates at Auschwitz.

Farrar Straus Giroux has created a Teacher’s Guide with suggestions for how to teach these graphic novels together with Anne Frank: Her Life in Words and Pictures.  The Teacher’s Guide, available here, includes extra background information, discussion questions and classroom activities to help students understand and think critically about the difficult lessons of the Holocaust.