After the occupation of the whole of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany and the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia on 15 March 1939, the discriminatory Nuremberg laws began to be applied in this territory.

Eight-year-old Hana and her older brother George (born Jiří Brady) watched their parents being arrested and taken away by the Nazis, and never saw them again.

While her brother survived by working as a labourer, Hana was sent to the gas chambers a few hours after her arrival on 23 October 1944.

[3] The story of Hana Brady first became public when Fumiko Ishioka (石岡史子, Ishioka Fumiko), a Japanese educator and director of the Japanese non-profit Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center, exhibited Hana's suitcase in 2000 as a relic of the concentration camp.

They then realized there were one and a half million children.The suitcase has large writing on it, a name and birthdate and the German word, Waisenkind (orphan).

[5][6] Ishioka began painstakingly researching Hana's life and eventually found her surviving brother in Canada.

[5] Karen M. Levine (born 1955), the producer of that documentary, was urged to turn the story into a book by a friend who was a publisher and whose parents were Holocaust survivors.

The family and the Center assert that even as such, the replica's contribution to the cause of human rights and peace education is not lessened by its lack of authenticity.

[4] In October 2006, the book won the Yad Vashem award, presented to George Brady at a ceremony in Jerusalem.

The real suitcase, on loan, was destroyed by neo-Nazi arsonists, who set fire to a warehouse in Birmingham, England, in 1984.