Margot Frank
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Margot Betti Frank (February 16, 1926 – late February or early March, 1945) was the elder sister of Anne Frank, whose deportation order from the Gestapo hastened the Frank family into hiding, and who subsequently perished in Bergen-Belsen.
[edit] Biography
Margot Betti Frank was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, she was named after her maternal aunt Bettina Mastertebattia Hollander (1898-1914) and lived in the outer suburbs of the city with her parents, Otto and Edith Frank, and her sister, Anne Frank, during the early years of her life.
She attended the Ludwig-Richter 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 immigrate to The Netherlands. 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, and achieved 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. In her diary, Anne Frank recounted instances of their mother suggesting she emulate Margot, and although she wrote of admiring her sister in some respects, Anne sought to define her own individuality without role models.
While Anne inherited her father's ambiguity towards Torah, 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 immigrate to Land of Israel 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 someone who still remains unidentified.
Along with the other occupants of the hiding place, Margot Frank was arrested by the Gestapo and detained in their headquarters overnight before being taken to a cell in a nearby prison for three days. From here they were taken by train, on 8 August, to the Dutch transit camp of Westerbork. As the Frank family had failed to respond to Margot's call-up notice in 1942, and had been discovered in hiding, they (along with Fritz Pfeffer and the van Pels family) were declared criminals by the camp's officials and detained in its Punishment Block to be sentenced to hard labour in the battery dismantling plant. They remained here until they were selected for Westerbork's last deportation to Auschwitz on 3 September 1944. Margot and Anne were transferred to Bergen-Belsen on October 30, where both contracted typhus in the winter of 1944. According to the testimony of Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper, a nurse who had been arrested for her work in the Dutch Resistance and had met the Frank family in Westerbork, Margot Frank died shortly before Anne at the end of February or beginning of March 1945. Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper and her sister Lin Jaldati buried them together in one of the camp's mass graves. Otto Frank was the only one to survive out of the eight that went into hiding. When he returned to Amsterdam, he located Anne's diary, later publishing it. 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, however, 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.
- The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, Willy Lindwer, Pan Macmillan (1989)
- 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.
