The life of Margot Frank is often remembered only through the diary of her younger sister, Anne. Yet Margot was a bright, modest, and determined young woman whose own story ended in the horrors of Bergen-Belsen. She was born on February 16, 1926, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank.
Her sister Anne was three years younger. The two girls shared a happy childhood, playing almost every day in the garden with neighborhood children. The Franks were a liberal Jewish family 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 Franks had already witnessed Nazi Storm Troopers marching through Frankfurt in 1932, 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 a law limiting the number of Jewish students in public schools to no more than 5 percent of the student population.
Public schools also became tools for spreading Nazi ideology to German youth. Teachers taught loyalty to Hitler, obedience to state authority, militarism, racism, and antisemitism. As a result, many Jewish families turned to private schools or chose to leave Germany altogether.
The Franks decided to leave. 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 seven years old when she moved to Amsterdam in December 1933. Anne joined her 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. They made new friends, and despite initial difficulties with the Dutch language, the girls became excellent students. Margot enrolled in an elementary school near their new home in the southern part of Amsterdam.
She picked up Dutch very quickly and scored well at the end of the school year. She then attended the municipal Lyceum for Girls, where she excelled. Her marks were consistently high, and 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. While the girls were happy in their new life, their parents faced greater challenges. Otto worked hard to build his company and a new life for his family.
The family's financial situation improved in 1938 when Otto started a new company called Pectacon, a wholesaler of herbs and spices. Otto even considered setting up a business in Great Britain and moving there, but the plan did not work out.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939. Margot was well aware of the threat of war. 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.
Margot was 14 years old when Germany invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940. The Nazi regime from which the Franks had fled in 1933 had finally caught up with them. The Netherlands became an occupied territory.
It did not take long for the Nazis to introduce anti-Jewish laws and regulations. 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. She had a large circle of friends that she could no longer see.
Jews were also forbidden from running 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 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 understood the danger and tried to emigrate to the United States and Cuba, but he 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.
On April 29, 1942, regulations were announced forcing Jews to wear a yellow badge in the form of a Star of David. 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.
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. 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 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, they were joined by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and family friend. Margot initially shared a room with Anne, but after Pfeffer arrived, she had to sleep in her parents' room.
The people in hiding depended completely on six helpers, who were employees and friends of Otto Frank. They provided food, clothing, and everything necessary to the eight people in the Secret Annex between 1942 and 1944.
Silence was essential, especially from 8:30 a.m. when the men in the warehouse below began their workday. Any sound could cause suspicion. The morning was devoted to reading, studying, and preparing for lunch.
At 12:30 p.m., when the warehouse workers went home, helpers came up to the Secret Annex to have lunch with those in hiding. Miep Gies usually stayed in the office to keep watch. The people in hiding could listen to Radio Oranje, a BBC program in which Queen Wilhelmina spoke 34 times during the war.
In the afternoons, while some took naps, Margot and Anne wrote in their diaries or studied. According to Anne's diary, Margot studied English, French, Latin, biology, and economics. She also helped Fritz Pfeffer with his Dutch and 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 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, Margot 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 be 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, like her mother. 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 ended abruptly 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 helper, Victor Kugler, remembered how Margot wept silently during the arrest. While Silberbauer confiscated their valuables and money, he scattered papers and notebooks. After the people from the Secret Annex were taken to Gestapo headquarters, two other helpers took the documents before the annex was emptied. While Anne's diary survived, Margot's diary was lost.
From a prison in Amsterdam, the family was sent to the Westerbork transit camp. They ended up in the prison barracks, and the men and women were 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, with Margot and over a thousand others packed closely 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 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. Out of 1,019 Jews deported to Auschwitz 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. 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, about one-third of the prisoners arriving in transports were already dead, and almost 80 percent of the rest were too weak and sick to walk.
On one occasion, out of a transport of 1,900 inmates, over 500 arrived dead. The prisoners received almost no food during the death marches and no food when they arrived at the camp. 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. It is thanks to them that we know the details of their time in the camp.
After Anne met one friend and told her 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. A woman standing next to Anne caught the package and refused to return it. When they tried again a few days later, Anne finally caught it and kept it for Margot and herself.
Unfortunately, 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, as she believed 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. The survivor recalled how during the cold winter they had to shout all the time for the door to be closed, but 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.
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 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. 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. 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.
Otto was liberated on January 27, 1945, when the Soviets entered Auschwitz. On the way back to the Netherlands, he 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 about the death of his daughters from Janny Brilleslijper, who, together with her sister Lien, had been with Margot and Anne until the end. Miep Gies passed him Anne's diary. 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 the 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. They can also see Anne's room, with walls brightened by picture postcards and movie stars she collected, and her original diary and other manuscripts she wrote until her arrest.
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 and make them live forever, to remind us of the dangers of discrimination, racism, and hatred, as history often seeks to repeat itself.