We are in 1918 and Europe is struggling to emerge from the nightmare of the First World War: a conflict marked by trench battles, where over nine million soldiers lost their lives and approximately twenty million were wounded. The German Jew Otto Frank is among the few lucky ones who return home safe and sound. A Germany heavily scarred by the horror it has just experienced, unbearably pressured by the burden of war reparations it has to pay. However, life is made to go on, and as the global political order is being redefined by the war, millions of people begin to live again, trying, day by day, to erase the memories of violence: the same goes for Lieutenant Frank and his wife Edith, who in 1925 are a young couple in love, seeing their happiness peak with the birth of two wonderful girls. Within the safety of the Frank family, the sweet, quiet Margot and the younger and more lively Anne spend peaceful childhood years, despite the twists of global history and the consequences of national politics making life increasingly difficult for everyone. Anne is a carefree three-year-old when the National Socialist Party gains significant ground in the German parliament and just four years old when Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor. She still cannot foresee the new nightmare that she and millions of other Jews will live through: the nightmare of a lost life, a dignity that is shattered and trampled upon, the endless terror due to human savagery, which Anne, already a teenager and forced to hide from the Nazis in a secret shelter, describes, day by day, in the famous diary that will later make her as famous as the Shoah, an exceptionally powerful symbol.
The book concludes with the testimony of the only survivor, Anne's father, regarding the discovery and publication of the diary.
