German-Dutch teenager from a noted Jewish family, she was the elder daughter of Otto Frank and Edith Frank and the elder sister of diarist Anne Frank. Margot’s deportation order from the Gestapo hastened the Frank family into hiding. According to the diary of her younger sister, Anne, Margot kept a diary of her own, but no trace of Margot’s diary has ever been found. She died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Margot and Anne were raised by their devoted parents in Frankfurt. With the rise of the Nazis the family emigrated from Germany to the Netherlands in stages. Margot moved to Amsterdam in December 1933 at age 7, followed by Anne in February 1934 at age 4.
Despite initial problems with the Dutch language, Margot went on to become a star pupil at her elementary school. She achieved excellent academic results.
It was a shock when German armies invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940. Although the first anti-Jewish measures soon took effect, Margot and her sister were not immediately affected. But after the summer of 1941, Margot and her sister had to attend a Jewish school with only Jewish students and teachers.
Margot followed the example of her mother, who became 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 immigrate to Palestine to found a Jewish state, where, as Anne Frank described in her diary, she wished to become a midwife.
In the summer of 1942 the systematic deportation of Jews from the Netherlands started. On 5 July 1942, Margot received a notice to report to a labor camp in Germany and the next day went into hiding with her family in the secret annex of her father’s company on Prinsengracht, in the city centre of Amsterdam. They were later joined by four other Jewish refugees (Hermann, Auguste and Peter van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer) and remained hidden for two years until they were discovered on 4 August 1944.
Along with the other occupants of the hiding place, Margot Frank was arrested by the Gestapo on 4 August 1944, and detained in their headquarters overnight before being taken to a cell in a nearby prison for three days. From here they were taken by train, on 8 August, to the Dutch Westerbork concentration camp. As the Frank family had failed to respond to Margot’s call-up notice in 1942 and had been discovered in hiding, they (along with Fritz Pfeffer and the Van Pels family) were declared criminals by the camp’s officials and detained in its punishment block to be sentenced to hard labor in the battery dismantling plant.
Margot and Anne were transferred to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 30 October, where both contracted typhus in the winter of 1944.
Margot Frank died in February or March 1945 at the age of 18 or 19 due to typhus. A few days later, Anne died due to the same illness. Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper and her sister Lientje buried them together in one of the camp’s mass graves.
Otto Frank was the only one to survive out of the eight people who went into hiding. When he returned to Amsterdam in June 1945 he was given Anne’s diary by Miep Gies, which he published in 1947 as a remembrance to her. Along with Anne, Margot Frank also wrote a diary during their time in hiding (Anne mentioned her sister’s diary in her own) but Margot’s diary was never found. However, many authors wrote fan-based diaries of Margot such as the novel The Silent Sister by Mazal Alouf-Mizrahi. Letters written by both Frank sisters to American pen pals were published in 2003. Buddy Elias (1925–2015) was Anne’s first cousin and last surviving close relative.
Link to Wikipedia biography