Edith Frank, the mother of Anne Frank, was born on January 16, 1900, in Aachen, then part of the German Empire. Her parents, Abraham and Rosa Hollander, were wealthy Jews who traded in industrial equipment. Edith was the youngest of four children. She was 14 when her sister Betina died, and she had two brothers, Julius and Walter.
After finishing high school, Edith worked in the family business for a few years. In 1924 she met Otto Frank, a German businessman twelve years her senior. They fell in love and celebrated their civil wedding in Aachen on May 8, 1925. Four days later, on Otto's 36th birthday, they had their Jewish wedding in the Aachen synagogue.
The couple moved to a new housing estate in Frankfurt am Main. Their elder daughter, Margot, was born there on February 16, 1926. Anne was born three years later, on June 12, 1929. The Franks were liberal Jews and lived in an assimilated community of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of various religions.
The stock market crash of October 24, 1929, marked the beginning of the Great Depression in the United States, which soon spread across the globe. It hit Europe particularly hard, where multiple nations were indebted to the United States. Germany, after World War I, had borrowed millions of dollars from the United States to pay the extensive reparation payments imposed by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.
When the United States called for those loans to be repaid to stabilize its own economy, it threw foreign economies, including Germany's, into depression as well. The Great Depression also played a role in the emergence of Adolf Hitler as a viable political leader in Germany. Deteriorating economic conditions in the 1930s created an angry, frightened, and financially struggling population open to more extreme political systems.
Hitler's anti-Semitic and anti-communist rhetoric depicted Jews as causing the depression. Fear and uncertainty about Germany's future led many Germans to seek the kind of stability Hitler offered. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg.
It was a moment when the Franks knew that dark clouds were gathering over the Jews in Germany, including them. The economic crisis was also hitting Otto's business. The Franks remembered well how, in the summer of 1932, members of the SA, the paramilitary Stormtroopers known as the Brownshirts for the color of their uniform, had marched through the streets of Frankfurt wearing swastika armbands and singing loudly.
They became even more concerned when the Nazi regime quickly began to restrict the civil and human rights of Jewish people. According to the census of June 16, 1933, Jews accounted for less than 0.8 percent of the total population of 67 million. The first concentration camp, Dachau, was established in March 1933, less than two months after Hitler became chancellor.
Because of business problems and growing anti-Semitism, the Franks made the difficult decision to leave their country and immigrate to the Netherlands. In September 1933, Otto 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 moved to Amsterdam soon after.
The Franks were among 300,000 Jews who fled from Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939. After their experiences with the Third Reich, the family soon felt at home in Amsterdam. The girls enrolled in Dutch schools, made new friends, and despite initial problems with the Dutch language, became excellent students, especially Margot.
While the girls seemed happy about their new life in their new country, the situation was more challenging for their parents. Otto had to work hard to get his company going and build a new life for his family. Seeing the development in Nazi Germany, he even tried to set up a new business in Great Britain and move there, but this plan did not work out.
The financial situation of the family improved in 1938 when Otto started a new company called Pectacon, a wholesaler of herbs and spices. Edith concentrated on running the household, struggled with a new language, and had a hard time settling in the Netherlands. She missed her family and friends who were still living in Germany, and in conversations she would often refer with melancholy to their life in Frankfurt.
At the end of 1937, in a letter to a friend who had lived next door to them in Frankfurt, Edith wrote that the years on the Marbachweg in Frankfurt were among the most beautiful. In the meantime, Edith's family who had been left behind in Aachen witnessed the violence and destruction of Kristallnacht, which occurred on November 9 and 10, 1938.
During Kristallnacht, Nazi leaders unleashed a series of coordinated violent riots against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories. The Nazi SA and German civilians ransacked Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues, hospitals, and schools. The German SS and police sent almost 30,000 Jewish males to concentration camps, primarily Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.
Edith's brother Julius escaped arrest because he had fought in the German Army and had been injured in World War I. However, Edith's other brother, Walter, was arrested and briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp. Soon after, both brothers immigrated to the United States via the Netherlands. Edith's mother, Rosa, left Nazi Germany as well, coming to the Netherlands and moving in with a family in March 1939.
World War II started on September 1, 1939. All of Edith and Otto's hopes that they would be safe in the Netherlands were dashed by the invasion of the German Army in May 1940. On May 10, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands. The German air forces used paratroopers in the capture of tactical points and to assist the advance of ground troops across the country.
The invasion was accompanied by heavy aerial bombardment of Rotterdam and culminated on May 14 with the destruction of its entire historic center. Because the Germans threatened to bomb the city of Utrecht in the same way, the Dutch forces surrendered one day later. Soon after, the Nazis started to occupy the whole country and passed new anti-Jewish laws designed to exclude Jewish people from society and restrict their livelihood.
Desperate attempts by the Franks to immigrate to the United States, with the help of Edith's brothers Julius and Walter as well as Otto's American friend Nathan Straus, failed. The life of the Franks, who were once again under Nazi domination, changed completely. The criminal Nazi regime from which they had run away in 1933 finally caught up with them in the country that had become their new home and had made them feel free to live their own life.
The Netherlands became an occupied territory, and it did not take long for the Nazis to begin introducing new anti-Semitic laws and regulations that restricted the lives of Jews. Jewish civil servants were fired, and Jewish businesses as well as Jewish people themselves had to be registered. They could no longer visit parks, cinemas, or non-Jewish shops.
Many places thus became off limits to Margot and Anne, who could not even go to the same school as before. Jewish children had to go to separate Jewish schools. According to new laws, Jews were no longer allowed to run their own businesses, and the Nazis forced Otto Frank to give up his companies. However, Otto had managed to transfer control of his businesses to his employees soon enough to keep his companies out of Nazi hands.
The situation only continued to get worse. In 1941, Jewish men were arrested during raids and then deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp. Among them were friends and acquaintances of the Franks, and reports of their deaths soon started coming in. Otto understood that the situation was critical and continued trying to immigrate to the United States and Cuba, but he never managed to obtain the necessary documents.
In January 1942, Edith's mother Rosa died. It was in the spring of the same year that Otto Frank, anticipating deportation of his own family, 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 badge in the form of the Star of David as a means of identification were announced in the Netherlands on April 29, 1942. Those caught without a badge after May 5 of the same year, when the regulations came into effect, were arrested and detained for a six-week period.
The systematic deportation of Dutch Jews to the death camps started in the summer of 1942. Transports regularly left the transit camps of Westerbork and Vught. Out of 140,000 Jews who lived in the Netherlands by the beginning of World War II, 107,000, including small children, were deported, mostly to Auschwitz and Sobibor. By September 1944, only 5,000 of them had returned after the war.
Before going into hiding, 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, a diary that would one day make her famous and in which she would write about her thoughts and feelings during the difficult times that were to come. Less than one month later, on July 5, 1942, Margot received a call-up for a so-called labor camp in Nazi Germany.
Knowing the fate of their friends and acquaintances who had been sent to such camps and never returned, the Franks did not hesitate for a second. The next morning they went into hiding in order to escape persecution in the Secret Annex. Edith and Otto were to stay with a rebellious Anne and a thoughtful Margot for 761 long days.
After seven days, the Franks were joined by the van Pels family, made up of Hermann, Auguste, and 16-year-old Peter, from whom Anne would receive her first kiss. In November they were joined by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and family friend. It is Anne's diary that tells us how the Frank family and four other Jews lived for more than two years in a three-story space entered through a revolving bookcase.
The people in hiding were completely dependent on six helpers. These were Miep and Jan Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and Bep and Johan Voskuijl. They were employees and friends of Anne's father who provided food, clothing, and everything necessary to the people in the Secret Annex between 1942 and 1944.
Writing helped Anne pass the time, and it is thanks to her diary that we can get a glimpse into the everyday life of the people in hiding. It was important to be silent, especially from 8:30 a.m. when the men in the warehouse below the Secret Annex started their working day. Any sound could cause suspicion.
The morning was devoted to reading, studying, and preparing for their lunch break at 12:30 p.m., when the warehouse workers went home for lunch. A few of the helpers came up to the Secret Annex to have lunch with the people in hiding. Miep usually stayed in the office to keep an eye on things. The people in hiding could see other faces and listen to the radio, including a program broadcast by the BBC with the Dutch queen Wilhelmina, who on May 13, 1940, had escaped from the invading German troops and traveled to England. She spoke 34 times.
In the afternoon, some people in hiding took a nap. Anne, who wanted to become a writer and journalist, would study or write in her diary. Margot, who saw a future for herself as a maternity nurse in Palestine, also had a diary. Then they had coffee prepared for dinner, and at 5:30 p.m., when the warehouse workers went home, the people in hiding could leave the Secret Annex and spread through the building. They would cook dinner and take turns using the bathroom, as they did in the morning before the warehouse workers started their working day.
In the hiding place, Edith and Anne often clashed. In her diary, Anne did not spare her mother and would often write about disagreements, conflict, mutual lack of understanding, and her mother's pessimism, from which she wanted to disassociate herself. At the same time, Anne realized that their quarrels were exacerbated by their difficult circumstances, and she depicted Edith as an understanding and loyal mother who stood up for her daughters and protected them against verbal attacks from the other inhabitants.
As Anne grew wiser, she managed to keep things bearable and wrote in her diary that she usually kept her mouth shut if she got annoyed, and so did her mother, so they appeared to get on much better together. According to Otto, Edith suffered more from their arguments than Anne did. Even though he was worried about Edith and Anne not having a good relationship, he never doubted his wife as an excellent mother who put her children above all else. Although she often complained that Anne would oppose everything she did, Edith was comforted to know that Anne trusted in her father, Otto.
Edith had a hard time in the Secret Annex. According to Miep, one of the helpers, she suffered from feelings of despair. Although the others were counting the days until the Allies came, making games of what they would do when it was all over, Edith confessed that she was deeply ashamed of the fact that she felt the end would never come.
The situation became more dangerous after September 1942, when special units made up of Dutch collaborators began hunting for hiding Jews. An estimated 25,000 Jews went into hiding in the Netherlands. Two-thirds of them survived, and one-third was betrayed and discovered.
To this day we do not know the reason for the police raid, but the hiding period for the eight people in the Secret Annex came to an abrupt end on August 4, 1944. The hiding place had been discovered, and its eight inhabitants were arrested. Two of the helpers were also arrested. One of them, Victor Kugler, remembered how Margot had been weeping silently during the arrest.
The Dutch police officers who arrested Edith and the others in hiding were headed by an Austrian SS officer, Karl Silberbauer. While Silberbauer confiscated their valuables and money, he scattered out the paper and notebooks. After the people from the Secret Annex were taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam, the two helpers Miep and Bep Voskuijl took Anne's documents before the Secret Annex was emptied by order of the Nazis. While Anne's diary and other manuscripts survived, Margot's diary was lost.
From a prison in Amsterdam they were sent to the Westerbork Transit Camp. They ended up in a prison barracks, and the men and women were separated as convicted offenders. Edith and her daughters had to do the dirty and unhealthy work of taking old batteries apart for reuse. According to fellow prisoner Rosa de Winter in her book, Edith was quiet and seemed numbed all the time.
On September 3, 1944, the Franks were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Their train was the last one to leave Westerbork for this extermination camp located in Nazi-occupied Poland. The train journey took three horrible days, during which Edith and over a thousand others were packed close together in cattle wagons. There was very little food and water and only a barrel for a toilet.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, Nazi doctors checked to see who would and who would not be able to do heavy forced labor. Around 350 people from the Franks' transport were immediately taken to the gas chambers and murdered. In total, out of 1,019 Jews who were 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 at Auschwitz. Edith, Margot, and Anne stayed together and depended on each other more than ever before. Survivors remembered Edith sharing her own small amount of bread with her two daughters. When Margot and Anne were temporarily isolated in a separate barracks because they suffered from scabies, Edith and two fellow prisoners dug a hole to pass them some extra food.
When at the end of October 1944 Margot and Anne were put on a transport to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Edith stayed behind at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In Rosa de Winter, with whom the Franks had stayed together at the Westerbork camp, Edith found a companion, as she had also been separated from her daughter.
In the very cold winter of 1944, the two women were constantly thirsty as there was no water, and in the mornings they had to wash themselves with snow. In late December 1944, the temperature outside was around minus 40 degrees. Edith, who knew nothing of her daughters' fate, fell ill and developed a high fever.
Rosa wanted to take her to the infirmary barracks, which was at least heated, but Edith resisted, as she wanted to live and was fearing the selections for gas chambers performed by Dr. Josef Mengele that took place regularly among the old prisoners. However, Rosa took her to the infirmary anyway, but unfortunately it was too late for Edith.
When Rosa saw her friend the last time, she looked like a shadow of herself. Edith did not eat anymore and was completely exhausted. She neither spoke nor responded if spoken to. Edith Frank was 44 years old when she died of starvation and disease in the sick barracks a few days later, on January 6, 1945, only three weeks before the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Her daughters, who by then were at Bergen-Belsen, did not survive either. Margot, who was in a weakened state, died when she fell from her bunk onto a cold stone floor. Anne died shortly after Margot. Margot and Anne both died in February 1945 owing to the effects of typhus.
It was initially believed that the sisters died a few weeks before the camp's liberation on April 15, 1945. However, it was later revealed that they may have died as early as February. Because we do not know the exact date of Margot's death, she was either 18 or 19 years old at the time. Her birthday was the same month that she died. Anne was 15.
However, there was one person from the Secret Annex who did survive. It was Otto, Edith's husband. He was liberated on January 27, 1945, when the Soviets entered Auschwitz. On the way back to the Netherlands he found out that Edith had died, but he hoped that their daughters 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 Otto learned about the death of his daughters. Miep, one of the helpers of the Secret Annex, passed him Anne's diary papers. 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 a novel about their life in the Secret Annex after the war would be over. In the end, at least Anne's dreams would come true, and the world learned about her story as well as that of her sister Margot and other members of the Secret Annex.
First 3,000 copies of Anne's book, "The Secret Annex," were published in 1947. Since then the book has been translated into over 70 languages. People all over the world were introduced to Anne's story. In 1960, the hiding place, which for two years became the home to eight people who tried to survive the atrocities of the criminal Nazi regime, became a museum: the Anne Frank House.
Today you can even visit the house in which Margot and Anne spent 761 long days. You can also see Anne's room, its walls brightened with picture postcards and movie stars that Anne collected, and see her original diary and other manuscripts, which she wrote until her arrest.
When Edith perished in a death camp in January 1945, she was a young woman who had to die only because she was Jewish. We must never forget the Holocaust and keep alive the memory of people like Edith, Margot, and Anne Frank, as well as all the others who perished together with their families and have nobody to remember them. We must make these victims live forever in order to remind us of the dangers of discrimination, racism, and hatred toward each other, as history often repeats itself.