He meticulously reconstructs their experiences of forced labour, factory work, disease, hunger, violence, freezing temperatures and death marches. Starting with their lives before the war, he retraces their journey from their detainment in Amsterdam to Dutch transit camp Westerbork, at which point their paths diverge as they are deported and transferred between Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, Raguhn, Melk and Neuengamme. In this first systematic and comprehensive historical account of its kind, author Bas von Benda-Beckmann turns to the wide array of sources available to historians today to restore to each their individuality. On the last page of what might be the best-known war story in all of Western history, Anne Frank and the seven protagonists of her diary joined the faceless mass of Holocaust victims whose individual fates, experiences and memories remain largely unknown.
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