Days before the Frank family disappeared, a thirteen-year-old handed her neighbor a tea set and a tin of glass marbles and asked her to keep them safe. That ordinary worry, sitting on the edge of catastrophe, is closer to the real Annelies Marie Frank than the icon she became. The popular version smooths her into unwavering optimism. The documents show someone sharper, angrier, funnier, and far more self-aware. Her family were German, from Frankfurt, assimilated and scholarly, and they left for Amsterdam in 1933 when Otto read the direction the country was heading. For a few years it worked. Then Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940 and the laws they had fled arrived on their doorstep: registration, business seizure, confiscated bicycles, the yellow star.

The question of why they did not simply leave has a concrete answer. Otto pursu ...