Margot Betti Frank was born on February 16, 1926, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank. She had a younger sister, Anne, who was three years her junior. The sisters enjoyed a happy childhood, playing almost every day in the garden with neighborhood children.
The Franks were liberal Jews living in an assimilated community on the outskirts of Frankfurt. Their lives changed dramatically on January 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. The family had already witnessed Nazi Storm Troopers marching through Frankfurt's streets, singing violent antisemitic songs.
The Nazi regime quickly began restricting the civil and human rights of Jewish citizens. On April 25, 1933, the government issued the "Law against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities," limiting Jewish students to no more than 5 percent of any public school's population. Public schools also became vehicles for spreading Nazi ideology to German youth.
Tens of thousands of Jews decided to leave Germany. In September 1933, Otto Frank founded a franchise for the Amsterdam branch of the Opekta company, which traded in pectin, a gelling agent for making jam. The rest of the family followed soon after.
Margot was 7 years old when she moved to Amsterdam in December 1933, followed by Anne in February 1934. The Franks were among 300,000 Jews who fled Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939. The family soon felt at home in Amsterdam, making new friends despite initial language difficulties.
Margot enrolled in an elementary school near their new home in southern Amsterdam. She picked up Dutch quickly and excelled academically. She later attended the municipal Lyceum for Girls, where she scored a 9 out of 10 in mathematics. A school friend recalled that even though Margot was the best at everything, she remained modest.
Otto worked hard to build his company and establish a new life. The family's financial situation improved in 1938 when he started Pectacon, a wholesaler of herbs and spices. Otto even considered moving the family to Great Britain, but the plan did not work out.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939. Margot was well aware of the threat. In the only letter she managed to send to a fellow student in the United States, written two weeks before the German invasion, she described how the family often listened to the radio during that stressful time and never felt safe, as the Netherlands bordered directly on Nazi Germany.
Margot was 14 years old when Germany invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940. The Nazi regime from which the family had fled in 1933 had finally caught up with them. The Netherlands became an occupied territory, and anti-Jewish laws were introduced quickly.
Jewish civil servants were fired, and Jewish businesses and individuals had to be registered. Jews could no longer visit parks, cinemas, or non-Jewish shops. Margot had to leave the Lyceum for Girls and transfer to the Jewish Lyceum, where she excelled as well. She also had to give up tennis and rowing, as Jews were no longer allowed to play sports.
The Nazis forced Otto Frank to give up his companies, but he had managed to transfer control to his employees in time to keep them out of Nazi hands. The situation worsened in 1941 when Jewish men were arrested during raids and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp. Among them were friends and acquaintances of the Franks, and reports of their deaths soon followed.
Otto tried to emigrate to the United States and Cuba but never obtained the necessary documents. In the spring of 1942, anticipating deportation, he decided to set up a hiding place in an empty part of his business premises at Prinsengracht 263.
Regulations forcing Jews to wear a yellow Star of David were announced in the Netherlands on April 29, 1942. Those caught without the badge after May 5 were arrested and detained for six weeks. The systematic deportation of Dutch Jews to death camps began in the summer of 1942.
Out of 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands at the start of the war, 107,000 were deported, mostly to Auschwitz and Sobibor, by September 1944. Only 5,000 returned after the war.
June 12, 1942, was probably the last happy moment for the Frank family. It was the day Anne celebrated her 13th birthday and received her diary. Less than one month later, on July 5, 1942, Margot received a call-up to report for a so-called labor camp in Nazi Germany.
Knowing the fate of friends and acquaintances who had been sent to such camps and never returned, the Franks did not hesitate. The next morning, they went into hiding. In the secret annex, the family would spend 761 long days.
After seven days, the Franks were joined by the Van Pels family: Hermann, Auguste, and 16-year-old Peter. In November, Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and family friend, joined them. While Margot initially shared a room with her sister, from the moment Pfeffer arrived she had to sleep in her parents' room, which could not have been easy for a sixteen-year-old girl.
The people in hiding depended entirely on six helpers, employees and friends of Otto Frank who provided food, clothing, and everything necessary between 1942 and 1944. Silence was essential, especially from 8:30 AM when warehouse workers below began their day. Any sound could cause suspicion.
Mornings were devoted to reading, studying, and preparing lunch. At 12:30 PM, when the warehouse workers went home, helpers came up to have lunch with those in hiding. The people in hiding could listen to "Radio Oranje," a BBC program in which Dutch Queen Wilhelmina spoke 34 times during the war.
In the afternoons, Margot wrote her own diary or studied. According to Anne's diary, Margot studied English, French, Latin, biology, and economics, and also helped Fritz Pfeffer with his Dutch. She took a correspondence course in Latin under the name of Bep Voskuijl, one of the helpers.
While Anne wanted to become a writer and journalist, Margot saw a future for herself as a maternity nurse in Palestine. In the evenings, Margot and Anne, who got along well, used to read parts of each other's diaries.
According to helper Miep Gies, Margot was very quiet and withdrawn in the Secret Annex. When Anne and Peter fell in love, Margot felt very alone. When Anne suspected her sister also had feelings for Peter, Margot denied it. In a short note to Anne, she wrote that she only felt a bit sorry that she had not found anyone yet with whom she could discuss thoughts and feelings.
While Anne was determined and often spoke her mind, Margot was more modest and tolerant. This may explain why Margot had a better relationship with their mother than Anne did. Before the family moved into the Secret Annex, Margot had become involved in Amsterdam's Liberal 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.
The situation for hidden Dutch Jews became more dangerous after September 1942, when special units made up of Dutch collaborators began hunting for Jews in hiding. An estimated 25,000 Jews went into hiding in the Netherlands. Two thirds survived, and one third were betrayed and discovered.
The hiding period for the eight people in the Secret Annex came to an abrupt end on August 4, 1944. Dutch police officers headed by Austrian SS officer Karl Silberbauer arrested Margot and the others. Two helpers were arrested as well. One of them, Victor Kugler, remembered how Margot wept silently during the arrest.
Silberbauer confiscated their valuables and money and scattered papers and notebooks. After the people from the Secret Annex were taken to Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam, two other helpers took the documents before the annex was emptied by order of the Nazis. While Anne's diary and manuscripts survived, Margot's diary was lost.
From a prison in Amsterdam, they were sent to the Westerbork transit camp and placed in the prison barracks, with men and women separated. Otto had to work during the day but could be with Edith, Margot, and Anne in the evening.
On September 3, 1944, they were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Their train was the last one to leave Westerbork for the extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. The journey took three horrible days, during which Margot and over a thousand others were packed closely together in cattle wagons with very little food and water and only a barrel for a toilet.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, Nazi doctors checked who would be able to do heavy forced labor. Around 350 people from Margot's transport were immediately taken to the gas chambers and murdered. In total, out of 1,019 Jews deported to Auschwitz together with the Franks, only 45 men and 82 women survived.
While Otto ended up in a camp for men, his wife and daughters were sent to the labor camp for women. Margot, chosen for slave labor, was forced to cut sods or carry stones. After the war, survivors described Margot, Anne, and their mother Edith as an inseparable trio. Otto would never see them again.
On the night of November 1, 1944, Margot and Anne were deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, while their parents stayed behind at Auschwitz. Edith died of weakness and disease on January 6, 1945, three weeks before the Red Army liberated the camp.
Sanitary conditions at Bergen-Belsen were terrible. There was no water for washing and hardly enough for drinking and cooking. Between January and March 1945, when prisoners were sent on death marches from other camps, about one-third of those who arrived were already dead, and almost 80 percent of the rest had to be fetched by truck because they were too weak and sick to walk.
The prisoners received almost no food during the death marches, and there was no food when they arrived at the camp either. The camp was so overcrowded that during the freezing winter months, prisoners had to sleep in a sitting position on the floor and share only 200 blankets among tens of thousands. Due to starvation, thirst, and typhus epidemics, the average daily mortality rate was between 250 and 300 prisoners.
When Margot and Anne arrived in Bergen-Belsen, they met a few Dutch friends, and it is thanks to them that we know details of their time there. After Anne told one friend they had no food or warm clothes, the friend promised to help. The next day, she threw a package containing a cookie, socks, and gloves over the barbed wire fence, but a woman standing next to Anne caught it. Hungry and desperate, the woman refused to return it.
When they tried again a few days later, Anne finally caught the package and kept it for Margot and herself. But in the camp's terrible conditions, Anne and Margot contracted typhus.
The sisters also reunited with Nanette Blitz, who survived the Holocaust and described Anne as bald, emaciated, and shivering. She added that Anne did not wish to live any longer, believing both her parents were dead. Another inmate later testified that both Margot and Anne had faces looking like skin over bone. They were terribly cold, placed in the most unfavorable spot in the barrack, downstairs next to the door, and during the cold winter they had to shout "close the door" all the time. That sound became weaker every day.
According to Gena Turgel, another Bergen-Belsen survivor who worked in the camp hospital and helped the sisters, Anne was delirious, terrible, and burning up. Gena also brought Anne water with which to wash. But the sisters did not survive.
Margot, in a weakened state, died when she fell from her bunk onto a cold stone floor. She was killed by the shock. Anne died shortly after Margot. They were buried in one of the camp's mass graves by Janny and Lien Brilleslijper, two Dutch Jews the sisters had met and befriended at Westerbork before their deportation to Auschwitz.
Margot and Anne both died in February 1945 from the effects of typhus. It was initially believed that the sisters died a few weeks before the camp's liberation on April 15, 1945, but it was later revealed that they may have died as early as February. Because the exact date of Margot's death is unknown, she was either 18 or 19 years old at the time. Her birthday was the same month that she died. Anne was 15.
Margot and Anne are among the millions of victims who were sentenced to death by starvation, thirst, illness, ill treatment, or extermination with Zyklon B gas. However, one person from the Secret Annex did survive: Otto, Margot's father. He was liberated on January 27, 1945, when the Soviets entered Auschwitz.
On the way back to the Netherlands, Otto learned that his wife Edith had died, but he hoped that Anne and Margot had somehow survived. He returned to the liberated Netherlands on June 3, 1945, nine days before what would have been Anne's 16th birthday. All hope was lost one month later when he learned of his daughters' deaths from Janny Brilleslijper, who, together with her sister Lien, had been with Margot and Anne until the end.
Miep Gies, one of the helpers of the Secret Annex, passed Anne's diary to Otto. After he found enough courage to read it, he was astonished by her writing. He also read about Anne's dreams to become a writer and journalist and her intention to publish her stories about their life in the Secret Annex after the war.
In the end, at least Anne's dreams came true, and the world learned about her story as well as that of her sister Margot and other members of the Secret Annex. The first 3,000 copies of Anne's book, "Secret Annex," were published in 1947. Since then, the book has been translated into over 70 languages.
In 1960, the hiding place that for two years was home to eight people trying to survive the atrocities of the Nazi regime became a museum: the Anne Frank House. Today, visitors can see the house where Margot and Anne spent 761 days, Anne's room with its walls brightened by picture postcards and movie stars, and her original diary and other manuscripts.
Today, Margot Frank is best known as "the sister of Anne," forever standing in her shadow. We can only wonder if she would have been as famous as Anne if her diary had survived the raid on the Secret Annex.
When Margot perished in the death camp in 1945, she was a young woman. She had to die only because she was Jewish. We must never forget the Holocaust and must keep alive the memory of people like Margot and Anne Frank, who have both become symbols of the Holocaust. We must remember them in order to remind ourselves of the dangers of discrimination, racism, and hatred, as history often seeks to repeat itself.