Margot Frank
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Margot Betti Frank' (February 16, 1926 – March, 1945) was the academically-gifted elder sister of Anne Frank, whose deportation order prompted the Frank family to go into hiding, and who perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Born in Frankfurt-am-Main, she was named after her maternal aunt Bettina Hollander (1898-1914) and lived in the outer suburbs of the city. She attended the Ludwig-Richer School in Frankfurt-am-Main until the election of Adolf Hitler on January 30, 1933 to the position of Chancellor in Germany brought an increase of anti-Jewish measures, among which was the expulsion of Jewish schoolchildren from non-denominational schools. In response to the rising tide of anti-semitism, the family decided to follow the 63,000 other Jews who had left Germany that year and emigrate. Edith Frank-Holländer and her daughters moved in with her mother in Aachen in June 1934 until Otto Frank found accommodation in Amsterdam. Margot and her mother left Germany to join him on December 5, 1933, followed by Anne in February 1934.
Margot was enrolled in an elementary school on Amsterdam's Jekerstraat, close to their new address in Amsterdam South, achieving excellent academic results, until an anti-Jewish law imposed a year after the 1940 German invasion of The Netherlands demanded her removal to a Jewish lyceum. There she displayed the studiousness and intelligence which had made her noteworthy at her previous schools, and was remembered by former pupils as virtuous, reserved, and deeply religious.
While Anne inherited her father's liberal perspective on faith, Margot followed her mother's example and became involved in Amsterdam's Jewish community. She took Hebrew classes, attended synagogue, and in 1941 joined a Dutch Zionist club for young people who wanted to emigrate to Palestine in order to found a Jewish state, where, according to Anne, she wished to become a midwife.
On July 5, 1942, she received a notice to report to a labour camp and the next day went into hiding with her family at her father's office building. They were later joined by four other Jewish refugees and remained hidden for two years until they were betrayed in August 1944 by an anonymous paid informant, who in spite of repeated investigations was never identified.
Along with the other occupants of the hiding place, Margot Frank was arrested by the Gestapo and held in their headquarters overnight before being taken to a nearby prison for three days. From here they were transported to the Dutch transit camp Westerbork where they were detained until their deportation to Auschwitz on 3 September 1944. She and Anne were transferred to Bergen-Belsen on October 30, where she contracted typhus and died at either the end of February or the beginning of March 1945 at the age of nineteen.
A diary kept by Margot Frank during her time in hiding is mentioned by Anne in her writings but has never been found. Letters written by both sisters to American pen friends were published in 2003.
[edit] Further reading
- The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition, Anne Frank, edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold Van der Stroom, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, compiled by H. J. J. Hardy, second edition, Doubleday 2003.
- Searching for Anne Frank: Letters from Amsterdam to Iowa, Susan Goldman Rubin, Abrams 2003
- Anne Frank Remembered, Miep Gies with Alison Leslie Gold, Simon and Schuster 1988
- Roses from the Earth: the Biography of Anne Frank, Carol Ann Lee, Penguin 1999.
- Anne Frank: the Biography, Melissa Muller, foreword by Miep Gies, Bloomsbury 1999.
- The Footsteps of Anne Frank, Ernst Schnabel, Pan 1988.
- The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, Carol Ann Lee, Penguin 2002.
