Edith Frank-Holländer

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Edith Frank-Holländer
Born Edith Holländer
January 16, 1900(1900-01-16)
Aachen, Germany
Died January 6, 1945 (aged 45)
Bergen-Belsen
Nationality German
Known for The Diary of a Young Girl
Religious beliefs Jewish
Spouse Otto Frank
Children Anne Frank and Margot Frank
Parents Abraham Holländer, Rosa Stern

Edith Frank-Holländer (January 16, 1900 – January 6, 1945), was the mother of Anne Frank and Margot Frank.

Edith Holländer was the youngest of four children, having been born into a Dutch/German-Jewish family in Aachen, Germany. Her father, Abraham Holländer (1860–1928) was a successful trader in industrial equipment and was prominent in the Aachen Jewish community as was her mother, Rosa Stern (1866-1942).

She met Otto Frank in 1924 and they married on his thirty-sixth birthday, May 12, 1925, at Aachen's synagogue. Their first daughter, Margot, was born in Frankfurt in 1926, followed by Anne, who was born on June 12, 1929.

The rise of anti-Semitism and the introduction of discriminatory laws in Germany forced the family to emigrate to Amsterdam in 1933, where Otto established a branch of his spice and pectin distribution company. Her brothers Walter (1897-1968) and Julius (1894-1967) escaped to the United States in 1938, and Rosa Holländer-Stern left Aachen in 1939 to join the Frank family in Amsterdam.

In 1940 the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and began their persecution of the country's Jews. Edith's children were removed from their schools, and her husband had to resign his business to his Dutch colleagues Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler, who helped the family when they went into hiding at the company premises in 1942.

The two-year period the Frank family spent in hiding with four other people (their neighbours Hermann van Pels, his wife and son, and Miep Gies's dentist Fritz Pfeffer) was famously chronicled in Anne Frank's posthumously published diary, which ended three days before they were anonymously betrayed and arrested on August 4, 1944. After detention in the Gestapo headquarters on the Euterpestraat and three days in prison on the Amstelveenweg, Edith, and those with whom she was in hiding, was transported to the Westerbork transit camp. From here they were deported to Auschwitz on September 3, 1944. Edith and her daughters were separated from Otto upon arrival and were never to see him again. On October 30 another selection separated Edith from Anne and Margot. Edith was selected for the gas-chamber, and her daughters were transported to Bergen-Belsen. She escaped with a friend to another section of the camp, where she remained through the winter, but died of exhaustion and malnutrition in January 1945 at the age of forty-four, twenty days before the Red Army liberated the camp.

When Otto Frank decided to edit his daughter's diary for publication, he was aware that his wife had come in for particular criticism because of her often disagreeable relationship with Anne, and cut some of the more heated comments out of respect for his wife, and other residents of the Secret Annexe. Nevertheless, Anne's portrait of an unsympathetic and sarcastic mother was duplicated in the dramatizations of the book, which was countered by the memories of those who had known her as a modest, distant woman who tried to treat her adolescent children as her equals.

The discovery, in 1999, of previously unknown pages excised by him, showed that Anne had discerned that while her mother very much loved her father, her father, though very devoted to Edith, was not in love with her, and this understanding was leading her to develop a new sense of empathy for her mother's position. And by the time Edith and her daughters were in Auschwitz, Bloeme Evers-Emden, an Auschwitz survivor interviewed by Willy Lindwer in The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, observed that: "They were always together - mother and daughters. It is certain that they gave each other a great deal of support. All the things a teenager might think of her mother were no longer of any significance".

[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.
  • 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, afterword 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.
  • The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, Willy Lindwer, Pantheon, 1991.

[edit] External links

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