Anne Frank and Me, by Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld, for Timeslip Tuesday

Anne Frank and Me, by Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld (1997), is this week's Timeslip Tuesday offering. It tells of a teenaged girl, Nicole, who's mind is full of stereotypical teen stuff, including pining over Jack.  Her diary thoughts of pining will perhaps be familiar to many readers who are, or once were, teenaged girls with their own hopeless crushes.  

At school, her history teacher is trying to explain the horrors of the holocaust, but it seems distant, and even Anne Frank's diary seems, according to the internet searches Nicole does, a possible fake....so she's not really interested in the class trip to the local "Anne Frank in the World" exhibit, except, of course, that Jack is going to, and maybe he'll want to sit with her on the bus...and he does!  but it turns out that he's actually interested in a friend of hers, and everything is horrible, and then there are gunshots, and everyone thinks is the strange goth-type boy shooting, and she falls and hits her head....

And comes to as a Jewish girl in German occupied Paris. 

She still is her American self at first, but very quickly she fades into the place of the girl whose life she is now living.  Things get worse and worse for the Jewish people of Paris, and she and her little sister end up in hiding.  But they are betrayed and sent on a hellish journey to a concentration camp.  Miraculously she actually meets Anne Frank, who tells her which way to go when they arrive, but the little sister goes the wrong way, Nicole follows, and they end up in a gas chamber.  And as she starts dying, she awakens in her own time again.

And it's not a shooting after all, it was a fireworks prank.

So this started off as a play, and I think this is why it doesn't quite work as novel.  Nicole's tone is very flatly matter-of-factly descriptive through all the horror she endures.  There's little emotion or introspection, and in general it's all told without much inner character development, which is possibly due to her not being herself anymore.  But still it's very gripping and impactful, and I stayed up late finishing it, and was moved by the hideous evil tragedy of it all...

,...with an extra coda of discomfort, not intended by the authors--this was written before the era of school shootings began in earnest with Columbine, and the fact that the shooting with which the time travel begins turns out to be a joke is pretty disturbing to a person reading it now.