Along with thousands of other Jewish families, the Franks left Nazi Germany amid rising anti-Semitism in the early 1930s, eventually making a new home for themselves in Amsterdam. Otto Frank and his wife, Edith, along with their daughters Margot and Anne, resumed a normal life there until 1940, when Germany invaded the Netherlands. When Margot received a Gestapo order to report to a labor camp in July 1942, the family went into hiding, along with four others. They remained hidden for two years, until their discovery in August 1944. The world later learned about their secret lives when Anne Frank’s diary was published in 1947 by her father, who was the only member of the family to survive the Holocaust. By all accounts, Anne's older sister Margot was also a talented writer and a deep thinker. Margot was known to have kept her own diary during the Franks' years in hiding, but it has never been found.
After the Secret Annex:
- The Diary of a Young Girl became one of history’s most famous accounts of the Jewish experience during World War II and the Holocaust, and was translated into 70 languages. Anne mentions Margot's diary in the book.
- After their discovery, the Frank family was arrested and taken to the Westerbork transit camp, and then to Auschwitz, where Edith Frank died of starvation. Margot and Anne were transferred to Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany.
- Margot, 19, and Anne, 15, are thought to have contracted typhus at Bergen-Belsen and died there in February or March of 1945 -- just weeks before the British Army liberated the camp.
