Margot Frank - Biography

Margot Betti Frank (16 February 1926 – early March 1945) was the older sister of Anne Frank, whose deportation order from the Gestapo hastened the Frank family into hiding, and who subsequently perished in Bergen-Belsen. According to the diary of her sister Anne, Margot was keeping a diary as well, but no trace of Margot's diary has ever been found.

Biography

Margot Betti Frank, named after her maternal aunt Bettina Holländer (1898-1914), was born in Frankfurt-am-Main and lived in the outer suburbs of the city with her parents, Otto Frank and Edith Frank-Holländer, and her sister, Anne Frank, during the early years of her life. Margot Frank was 16 years of age when she and her family went into hiding. Her family hid in the back upper floors of her father's office building.

She attended the Ludwig-Richter School in Frankfurt-am-Main until the appointment of Adolf Hitler on 30 January 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 5 December 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 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 ambivalence towards the 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 to found a Jewish state, where, according to Anne, she wished to become a midwife.

On 5 July 1942, she received a notice to report to a labor 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 on 4 August 1944 by someone who was never identified.

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 Westerbork concentration camp. 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 labor 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 30 October, where both contracted typhus in the winter of 1944. Margot Frank died several days before her sister Anne in early 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 was given Anne's diary by Miep Gies, which he later published. A diary kept by Margot Frank during her time in hiding is mentioned by Anne in her writings but has never been found. However, letters written by both sisters to American pen pals were published in 2003.