The story of Anne Frank is told in a new, five-episode adaptation.

The Diary Of Anne Frank : Monday to Friday, 20:30, BBC Knowledge

Seldom does anyone visit Amsterdam without taking time to pay tribute to a girl’s courage and spirit at a museum in a small and narrow house on the Prinsengracht.

This is the former hiding place where Anne Frank wrote her diary, and the near-impossiblity of a family’s concealment in such a tiny, wooden place, where every breath and step must have sounded like a thunder clap, is driven home.

The story is told in a new, five-episode adaptation written by leading novelist Deborah Moggach. The programme, of a calibre to provide a fitting memorial, was made to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the start of World War Two.

Frank started to write her diary on her 13th birthday in June 1942, two weeks before she and her family were forced into hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland. Written from the cramped conditions of an annexe in her father’s spice warehouse, Frank’s moving, feisty and often humorous account of her life over a two-year period has become the most widely read piece of non-fiction — apart from the Bible.

The Franks are joined by another family — Hermann and Petronella van Daan, and their teenage son, Peter. Frank treats her diary as a friend, confiding to it the details of life in hiding and her feelings about her companions.

Here is the entry for July 15 1944:

“It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.

“It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.”

The family was betrayed to the Nazis in 1944 and deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where Anne died of typhoid aged only 15. Her sister and mother also died in concentration camps. The diary, which was recovered by one of the employees, was later returned to Anne’s father, the only member of the family to have survived. He published it under the title Het Achterhuis (The Annex) in 1947.

Anne is played by Ellie Kendrick; her father Otto by Iain Glen; and mother Edith by Tamsin Greig.