Of the eight people hiding in the “Secret Annexe,” only one, Anne’s father, survived. All their Dutch “protectors,” or helpers, managed to live through the war, and even Anne’s school friend, Lies, about whom she thought and dreamed, and whom she mentions in the Diary, survived. In his book Anne Frank: A Portrait in Courage, Ernst Schnabel has retraced Anne’s life. It starts in the town of Frankfurt, in the house where Anne spent her early childhood; Schnabel interviewed people who knew the Frank family in Frankfurt and, later, those who knew them in Amsterdam.

After the group’s capture by the Nazis, they were taken back to Germany and were sent to concentration camps. Ernst Schnabel also interviewed people who had been in the camps with the Franks and had witnessed their final moments, as well as those of the other members of the group in hiding.