Edith Frank—Mother of Anne and Margot

Late in the morning of 4 August 1944, Dutch police entered the Secret Annexe and arrested the Frank family, the van Pels family, Fritz Pfeffer, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler (who worked at Opetka). Otto Frank was the managing director of Opetka, and they had helped to hide the residents.

On 8 August 1944, after several days in police custody in Amsterdam, the eight residents of the Secret Annexe were deported by train to Westerbork, a large transit camp in the Netherlands. From there, they were placed in a punishment barrack because going into hiding was considered a criminal act.

I have often thought about how horrific that time must have been for Edith Frank. Not knowing what was next to happen to her daughters. I can only imagine that her main concern was the well-being of her children.

Edith was the youngest of four children. She was born on 16 January 1900 to a German Jewish family in Aachen, Germany. Her father, Abraham Holländer, was a successful businessman in industrial equipment who was prominent in the Aachen Jewish community together with her mother, Rosa Stern.The ancestors of the Holländer family lived in Amsterdam at the start of the 18th century, emigrating from the Netherlands to Germany circa 1800. Her maiden name, Holländer, is German for Dutchman. Edith had two older brothers, Julius and Walter, and an older sister, Bettina. Bettina died when she was 16 due to appendicitis, and Edith was just 14. Julius and Walter made it to the United States in 1938, surviving the Holocaust. The Holländer family adhered to Jewish dietary laws and was considered religious. Nevertheless, Edith attended the Evangelical Higher Girls School and passed her grades—leaving exams (Abitur) in 1916. Afterwards, she worked for the family’s company. In her free time, she read copiously, played tennis, went swimming and had a large circle of friends.

She met Otto Frank in 1924, and they married on his 36th birthday, 12 May 1925, at the Aachen Synagogue. They had two daughters born in Frankfurt, Margot, born 16 February 1926, and Anne, born 12 June 1929.

In 1933 the Frank family moved to the Netherlands and worried about the Nazi persecution of German Jews, and Otto Frank travelled to Amsterdam.

Although she returned to the home of her ancestors, Edith found emigration to the Netherlands difficult. The family lived in confined conditions, and she struggled with the new language. She remained in contact with her family and friends in Germany but also made new friends in Amsterdam, most of them fellow German refugees. Edith was an open-minded woman who educated her daughters in a modern way. Her mother, Rosa Holländer-Stern, left Aachen in 1939 to join the Frank family in Amsterdam, where she died in January 1942.

Aachen is only a few kilometres away from the southeastern Dutch border.

Anne had little sympathy for her mother during their turbulent years in the annexe, and she had few kind words to say about her, especially in the earlier entries of her diary. But then again, when a teenage girl has good things to say about her mother or father, for that matter, teenagers always know best. Later on in her diary, Anne changes her view of her mother. As Anne matures±—she has a more objective perspective and sympathetic feelings for her mother.

On 3 September 1944, Edith and those with whom she had been in hiding were transported to Westerbork and then placed on the last train to be dispatched to Auschwitz.

All the Annexe residents survived the initial selection, but the men were separated from the women. Edith Frank never saw her husband again. This was not the last separation for Edith. On 30 October 1944, the second selection separated Edith from Anne and Margot. Edith was selected for the gas chambers, and her daughters were transported to Bergen-Belsen. Edith managed to escape with a friend to another section of the camp, where she remained through the winter. Edith became very ill and died of illness and starvation on 6 January 1945, three weeks before the Red Army liberated Auschwitz and 10 days before her 45th birthday.

Sources

Click to access USHMM-Anne-Frank-Timeline.pdf

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/d/the-diary-of-anne-frank/character-analysis/mrs-frank

https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/go-in-depth/reconstruction-arrest-people-hiding/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/annefrank/biogs/edithfrank.shtml