Today, February 16 marks the birthday of Margot Betti Frank (1926 - 1945). Much of what we know about her comes through the lens of her three years’ younger sister, Anne through Anne’s posthumously published diary.
In high school drama club, I was cast as Margot in the stage play, “The Diary of Anne Frank.”1 The Margot of the play is quiet and gentle, reserved and fairly lacklustre.
According to my drama teacher, I was made for the role.
Dig deeper and the picture that emerges is that of a girl popular with her peers who excelled at academics, languages, and sports, especially tennis and rowing. When the Frank family moved from Germany to the Netherlands in 1933 to escape the rising tide of antisemitism, seven year old Margot quickly picked up the Dutch language. Her dream was to be a maternity nurse in what was then Palestine.2
“Margot was the best at everything, but she remained modest. You could trust her, you could lean on her.” — School friend, Jetteke Frijda.3
Margot also kept a diary, although hers was never found.4
On May 10, 1940, Hitler invaded the Netherlands. The Nazi regime quickly imposed restrictions on the lives of Jews. Margot, Anne and other Jewish children had to transfer to Jewish-only schools. Margot sometimes rode her bicycle to her former school to catch glimpses of her friends when school let out.5
On July 5, 1942, Margot received notice to report for deportation to a German labor camp. The next day, the Frank family went into hiding in a secret annex on the premises of her father, Otto’s pectin6 business. As recorded by Anne, the list of subjects Margot kept up with is staggering.
“English, French, Latin by correspondence, English shorthand, German shorthand, Dutch shorthand, Mechanics, Trigonometry, Soild Geometry, Physics, Chemicstry, Algebra, Geometry, English literature, French literature, German literature, Dutch literature, Bookkeeping, Geography, Modern History, Biology, Economics, reads everything, preferably on religion and medicine.” She also found time to tutor fellow attic resident Fritz Pfeffer, in Dutch.7
Being sedentary and indoors had to have been hard on the athletic Margot. When Anne and Peter van Pels began their romance, she seems to have felt like a third wheel. Loneliness and living with the constant stress of never knowing when the Nazi-controlled police might discover them and burst in may have contributed to the quiet, pensive portrait we have of her through Anne.
On August 4, 1944, the Dutch Nazi police did indeed burst in. The Franks and their friends were arrested and interned at the Westerbork transit camp and later deported to Auschwitz in Poland. In October 1944, Margot and Anne were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany where they contracted typhus. They died in February 1945 within days of each other. Two months later, British soldiers liberated the camp.8
While the fate of Margot’s diary remains unknown, we do have her and Anne’s 1940 letters in English to their American penpals, sisters Juanita and Betty Ann Wagner, students at Danville Community School in Des Moines, Iowa. Margot’s April 27, 1940 letter to fourteen year old Betty Ann is a rare opportunity to hear Margot in her own words.
“We often listen to the radio as times are very exciting, having a frontier with Germany and being a small country we never feel safe.”9
After the war, Betty Ann Wagner became a teacher. She never forgot her Dutch penpals and wrote to the Frank’s address in Amsterdam. A few months later, she received a reply from Otto Frank explaining that his daughters had died in a concentration camp. Until then, Wagner hadn’t known the girls were Jewish.
She recalled, “When I received the letter I shed tears, and the next day took it with me to school and read Otto Frank’s letter to my students. I wanted them to realize how fortunate they were to be in America during World War II.”10
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March is shaping up to be a busy month for me, which is exactly how I like it! On Saturday, March 2nd, I’ll be at the Asbury Book Cooperative in Asbury Park, NJ. The free in-conversation event starts at 7pm and ends with me signing copies of IRISH EYES. Sign up on Eventbrite.
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The play is a dramatization by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackette and opened on Broadway on October 5, 1955.
https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/main-characters/margot-frank/. Israel was founded on May 15, 1948.
Ibid.
Margot’s diary is referenced early on in Anne’s.
https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/main-characters/margot-frank/
Pectin is a thickener used in jam-making.
https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/main-characters/margot-frank/#source-355240
Ibid.
Myers-Verhage, Shelby, “Postmarked from Amsterdam. Anne Frank and her Iowa Pen Pal.” https://web.archive.org/web/20131209053251/http://traces.org/anne.html
Ibid.
I read Anne's diary in 6th grade. I had forgotten how much Margot had kept up with her studies while they lived in the annex. Wow.