Margot Frank

Margot Frank was the elder sister of Anne Frank and one of the eight people who hid in the secret annex in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. She was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, to a Jewish family that later moved to Amsterdam in 1933 to escape the persecution by the Nazis. She attended a public school until 1941, when she was forced to transfer to a Jewish school. She was a bright and studious girl who excelled in languages and mathematics. She also enjoyed reading, writing, and playing sports. Margot received a call-up notice from the Nazis to report for deportation to a labor camp in Germany on July 5, 1942. This prompted her family to go into hiding the next day in the annex of her father's office building, where they were joined by four other Jews: Hermann van Pels, his wife Auguste, their son Peter, and Fritz Pfeffer. Margot kept a diary of her own during the two years they spent in hiding, but it was never recovered after their arrest by the Gestapo on August 4, 1944. She and her sister Anne were transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on September 3, 1944, and then to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in October or November 1944. There, they both contracted typhus and died sometime in February or March 1945, just a few weeks before the liberation of the camp by the British Army. Margot Frank is best known as the elder sister of Anne Frank, whose diary became one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust. Margot's personality and relationship with Anne are revealed through Anne's diary entries, which describe Margot as quiet, sensible, gentle, and caring, but also distant and reserved. Margot often acted as a mediator between Anne and their parents or other occupants of the annex. She also shared some of Anne's interests and dreams, such as becoming a nurse or emigrating to Palestine after the war. Margot's diary, if it had survived, would have provided another valuable perspective on the life and fate of the Frank family and their companions in hiding.