Jeroen De Bruyn was born in 1993 in Antwerp. At age fif­teen — the same age as Anne when she died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen con­cen­tra­tion camp — Jeroen began doing orig­i­nal research on the Secret Annex. He got to know the Anne Frank House first­hand dur­ing an intern­ship there in 2011. He went on to study jour­nal­ism, sub­se­quent­ly con­tribut­ing to promi­nent Flem­ish news mag­a­zines like Knack and Joods Actueel, and work­ing as a senior edi­tor for the major Bel­gian news­pa­per Gazet van Antwer­pen.