January 6th, 1945.
Awitz Burkanau concentration camp, Poland.
A 44 year old woman lies dying in the sick barracks.
She weighs perhaps 70 lbs.
Her body is skeletal, covered in soores, ravaged by starvation and dysentery.
Her daughters were taken away 2 months ago.
She doesn’t know where they are.
She doesn’t know if they’re alive.
Her husband is somewhere in the men’s camp.
She’ll never see him again.
3 weeks from now, Soviet forces will liberate Awitz.
three weeks.
But Edith Frank won’t live to see liberation.
In a few hours, maybe a day, she will close her eyes for the last time.
Her body will be thrown onto a pile of corpses.
No ceremony, no grave, just another dead Jew.
And I’m warning you now.
The story of how Anne Frank’s mother died, the brutal choices she made that killed her, the systematic torture that destroyed her body and spirit over 5 months, will shatter everything you thought you knew about the Frank family story.
Because everyone knows Anne Frank.
Everyone has read her diary, but almost no one knows what happened to her mother.
Almost no one knows that Edith Frank starved herself to death trying to save her daughters.
that she dug a hole through a barracks wall with her bare hands to pass them food, that she watched them be taken away and simply gave up.
This is the story of a mother’s love in the Holocaust.
And it’s the story of how that love killed her.
Before we dive in, make sure you’re subscribed and hit that notification bell because we’re about to uncover the brutal reality of Edith Frank’s life and death.
the privileged childhood, the perfect marriage that wasn’t, the difficult relationship with Anne that never got resolved, and the five months of hell that ended with her dying alone in Awitz while her entire family was scattered across Nazi death camps.
This is Edith Frank’s story.
January 16th, 1900, Aken, Germany, near the Dutch border.
Edith Hollander was born into wealth and privilege.
Her father, Abraham Hollander, was a successful businessman in the industrial equipment trade, scrap metal, machinery, boilers.
The family was prosperous, respected, prominent in Aan’s Jewish community.
Edith was the youngest of four children.
She had two older brothers, Julius and Walter, and an older sister, Betina.
The Hollanders lived comfortably.
They attended synagogue.
They were observant, but not strictly Orthodox.
They were educated, cultured German Jews who saw themselves as German first.
For the first 14 years of Edith’s life, everything was perfect.
Then her sister Betatina died.
The cause is uncertain.
Possibly appendicitis.
Betina was 16 years old.
Edith was 14.
It was her first brutal encounter with death, with loss, with the fragility of life.
She never forgot it.
Despite the tragedy, Edith’s life continued normally.
She finished high school.
She worked in the family business for a few years.
She was educated, sophisticated, fluent in German.
In 1924, at age 24, Edith met Otto Frank at an engagement party.
He was 35, 11 years older.
He came from a respected Frankfurt banking family.
He was cultured, well read, thoughtful.
They married on May 8th, 1925.
On February 16th, 1926, their first daughter, Margot, was born.
Three years later on June 12th, 1929, Anne was born.
Photos from this period show dinner parties, tennis with friends, holidays by the sea.
For Edith, these were the happiest years of her life.
But beneath the surface, something was wrong.
Ottofrank loved Edith.
He was devoted to her, but he wasn’t in love with her.
He had loved someone else before, a woman he couldn’t marry because he wasn’t wealthy enough.
His marriage to Edith was partially one of convenience.
She would make a good wife.
She came from a prosperous family.
But passion that was absent.
Edith knew.
She must have known.
Or perhaps she convinced herself that companionship and respect were enough.
That raising children together was enough.
But it wasn’t.
And years later, her teenage daughter Anne would figure it out.
Would write in her diary that her mother loved her father deeply.
But her father, though devoted, wasn’t in love with her.
would observe that this loveless marriage had made her mother bitter, had contributed to the tension between them.
But in the late 1920s and early 1930s, none of this mattered yet because something far worse was coming.
In 1932, the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing, the SA, marched through Frankfurt wearing swastika armbands.
These brown shirts sang loudly in the streets.
When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, things will go well again.
Edith and Otto heard them.
They discussed their concerns, but they couldn’t leave immediately.
Making a living abroad was difficult.
On January 30th, 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany.
Within months, discriminatory laws targeted Jews.
Jewish businesses were boycotted.
Jewish professionals were fired.
Jewish children were harassed.
OttoFrank made a decision.
They would leave Germany.
In 1933, Otto moved to Amsterdam and established a branch of his spice and pectin distribution company, Opeka.
In February 1934, Edith followed with Margot and Anne.
They rented an apartment in the Marua Plane neighborhood.
They rebuilt their lives, but it was hard for Edith.
She had left behind her entire world, her family, her friends, her language, her home.
She never fully adjusted to the Netherlands.
Anne’s cousin, Burnernhard Elias, later said, “Edith never felt well in Holland.
She struggled with Dutch.
She remained in contact with German friends and family.
She made new friends among German Jewish refugees, but she never felt at home.
Still, she tried.
She became involved in Amsterdam’s liberal Jewish community.
She attended synagogue regularly with Margot.
She raised her daughters in a modern way, treating them as equals.
But this approach would later create problems, especially with Anne.
Anne was strong willed from the start.
Even as a baby, she gave Edith more trouble than Margot.
Margot was quiet, studious, compliant.
Anne was outgoing, talkative, opinionated.
She formed her own personality quickly.
She challenged authority.
Edith wasn’t sure how to handle her.
They clashed constantly.
Anne openly preferred her father.
This hurt Edith deeply.
The rift between them grew.
In 1939, Edith’s world collapsed again.
Her brothers Julius and Walter, still in Germany, fled to the United States.
Her brother, Walter, was briefly arrested and imprisoned in a concentration camp before escaping.
In March 1939, Edith’s mother, Rosa Hollander Stern, left Aen and moved in with the Frank family in Amsterdam.
Then came May 10th, 1940.
Germany invaded the Netherlands.
Within 5 days, the country surrendered.
The Frank family was trapped.
Desperate attempts to immigrate to the United States with the help of Edith’s brothers failed.
Bureaucracy, quotas, it was impossible.
In January 1942, Edith’s mother Rosa died.
She had been seriously ill for some time.
Edith was devastated.
First, her sister Betina at age 14.
Now, her mother.
The losses were accumulating and the persecution was intensifying.
Jewish children were removed from public schools.
Otto had to resign his business to avoid confiscation.
Jews had to wear yellow stars.
Curfews were imposed.
The net was tightening.
Then came July 5th, 1942.
Margot received a call-up notice for a labor camp.
Everyone knew what that meant.
Deportation, probably death.
Otto and Edith made an immediate decision.
The next day, July 6th, the family went into hiding in the secret annex.
The secret annex.
rooms in the back of Otto’s business premises, hidden behind a bookcase.
For the next two years and one month, Edith Frank lived in those cramped rooms with seven other people.
Her husband, her two daughters, the Van Pel’s family, Herman Augusta, and their son Peter, and Fritz Feffer, a dentist.
Eight people sharing a few rooms, no privacy, constant tension, petty arguments that erupted from the stress of confinement.
And for Edith, the most painful part wasn’t the fear of discovery or the terrible conditions.
It was her relationship with Anne.
They fought constantly.
Anne wrote extensively about it in her diary.
She described her mother as unsympathetic, sarcastic, critical.
She wrote that Edith didn’t understand her, that she wasn’t a real mother.
November 7th, 1942, Anne wrote that she felt contempt for her mother, that she couldn’t confront her with her carelessness, her sarcasm, and her hard-heartedness.
She concluded, “She’s not a mother to me.
” On another occasion, she wrote, “I finally told Daddy that I love him more than I do mother.
” Otto tried to mediate.
He told Anne it was just a phase, but Edith knew better.
She knew Anne meant it, and it destroyed her.
Meep Geese, one of the helpers who brought food and supplies, noticed the friction.
She later said Edith was noticeably saddened by her daughter’s rejection.
But there’s no record of Edith’s perspective.
No diary, no letters, only Anne’s one-sided account.
And that account is devastating.
But here’s what Anne didn’t see, what she couldn’t see as a teenager.
Edith was suffering.
She was trapped in a loveless marriage with a man devoted but not in love with her.
She was confined in a tiny space with no privacy.
She was terrified every moment that they would be discovered.
She was trying to maintain stability to provide structure to keep her family functioning in an impossible situation and her younger daughter openly despised her for it.
The emotional burden was crushing.
Later, Anne would begin to see things differently.
In January 1944, she admitted she had been harsh.
She wrote, “The period of tearfully passing judgment on mother is over.
She tried to understand her mother’s situation.
She developed empathy, but she never fully reconciled with her mother.
Not really, and she would never get the chance.
” August 4th, 1944.
10:30 a.
m.
German and Dutch police officers raided the secret annex.
They had been betrayed.
Someone had told the authorities.
To this day, we don’t know who.
The eight people in hiding and two helpers were arrested.
After detention at Gestapo headquarters and three days in prison, they were transported to Westerborg Transit Camp.
At Westerborg, conditions were harsh but survivable.
Edith, Anne, and Margot were classified as convicted criminals because they had been caught in hiding.
They were assigned to the punishment barracks.
Their job was to dismantle old batteries for reuse.
Dirty, unhealthy work.
Their hands bled.
The chemicals burned their skin.
Rosa Dewinter, another prisoner at Westerborg, later described Edith during this time.
Quiet, she seemed numbed all the time.
But something changed at Westerborg.
Anne’s letters and behavior show that her relationship with her mother improved.
Otto later wrote to his cousin.
In fact, she was on very good terms with her mother at the camp.
Later, facing real danger, real suffering, the petty arguments of the secret annex faded.
They were mother and daughter.
They needed each other.
And Edith, despite everything, still fought to protect her children.
September 3rd, 1944.
Edith, Otto, Anne, and Margot, along with over 1,000 other prisoners were loaded onto a train.
The last transport from Westerborg to Ashvitz.
Cattle cars, no food, no water, one barrel for a toilet.
About 70 people crammed into each wagon.
According to Lenini de Yong Van Nardan, who was in the same wagon as the Frank family, Edith tore off the red top of her prison clothing during the journey.
Why? We don’t know.
Despair, defiance, heat.
The gesture was never explained.
The journey took 3 days.
On September 5th, late at night, the train arrived at Avitz Burkanau.
The platform, blinding lights, dogs barking, SS guards screaming.
Schnel, Rouse, move.
Get out.
This was the selection.
SS doctors determined who was fit for forced labor and who would be sent immediately to the gas chambers.
The old, the sick, the very young, children under 14.
They went left to the gas chambers to immediate death.
Otto was separated from his family.
Men to one side, women to the other.
He never saw his wife and daughters again.
Edith, Anne, and Margot passed the selection.
They were registered.
Their heads were shaved.
Their arms were tattooed with prisoner numbers.
Edith became A25246.
Anne became A25063.
Margot became A25064.
They were stripped naked, deli prisoner uniforms.
The processing was designed to strip away identity, to transform human beings into numbers.
After registration, Edith, Anne, and Margot were assigned to barracks 29 in the BYB section of Burkanau.
Rosa de Winter Levy, the same woman who had seen Edith at Westerborg, was also in barracks 29.
She and Edith formed a bond.
Both were mothers.
Both were terrified for their daughters.
At Avitz, witnesses later testified that Edith, Anne, and Margot were inseparable.
Blumma Evers Mden.
Another prisoner said, “They were always together, mother and daughters.
It is certain that they gave each other a great deal of support.
All the things a teenager might think of her mother were no longer of any significance.
The conflicts of the secret annex were forgotten.
They clung to each other.
They shared whatever scraps of food they received.
They tried to survive together.
Then Anne and Margot contracted scabies, a skin disease caused by mites.
highly contagious, extremely itchy.
In the filthy conditions of Awitz, it spread rapidly.
Anne and Margot were isolated in a separate barracks, the Cretza block, the scabby’s block.
They were quarantined away from the other prisoners.
Edith couldn’t see them, couldn’t touch them, couldn’t even talk to them, but she could help them.
With two other prisoners, including Lena de Young Vanardan, Edith dug a hole through the barracks wall.
They dug with their bare hands.
Through wood and plaster they dug until they could reach through to the other side.
And then every day Edith passed her food rations through that hole to her daughters.
Her watery soup, her crust of bread, the tiny portions that were barely enough to keep one person alive.
She gave them to Anne and Margot.
She kept nothing for herself, or almost nothing.
This is how Edith Frank began to die.
Not from disease, not from execution, from choice, from maternal sacrifice, from the desperate belief that if she could just keep her daughters alive, it would be worth it.
October 30th, 1944.
Another selection.
Over 8,000 women, including Ann and Margot, were chosen for transport to Bergen Bellson concentration camp in northern Germany.
Edith was not selected.
Rosa de Winter watched the selection.
She later described it in her memoir.
The women had to stand naked in the cold for hours.
One by one, SS doctors examined them under spotlights and decided their fate.
When Anne and Marggo’s turn came, Rosa saw Anne nudge her sister.
They stood upright under the light, naked, exposed, and then they were gone.
Rosa wrote and Mrs.
Frank screamed, “The children, oh God.
” On November 31st, 1944, the transport left.
Over 1,000 women were locked in barracks until the train departed.
Edith watched them go.
Her daughters, Anne, 15 years old, Margot, 18.
They were being taken away.
She didn’t know where.
She didn’t know if she would ever see them again.
Rosa Dwinter, whose own daughter had been sent to a different labor camp, understood Edith pain.
Rosa later wrote, “We comforted each other.
two mothers, both separated from their daughters, both helpless, both knowing that in Avitz, separation usually meant death.
After Anne and Margot left, Edith was transferred with other women to the Aager section of Burkanau, where the infirmary barracks were located.
This was ominous.
The Aagger was often a holding area for prisoners about to be murdered.
Several more selections followed.
Edith didn’t pass any of them.
Each time she was marked for the gas chambers, but each time with the help of the block ela, the barracks leader, she managed to escape.
She hid.
She switched places with other prisoners.
She survived, but barely.
Without her daughters, Edith had no reason to fight.
She stopped eating.
What little food she received, she no longer consumed.
Rosa de Winter noticed.
Other prisoners noticed.
Edith was wasting away.
Her body was consuming itself.
Muscle turned to fuel, fat reserves depleted, her organs began failing.
Witnesses later testified that Edith was saving food for her daughters, that she was hoarding whatever scraps she could, keeping them in the hope that somehow she could get them to Anne and Margot.
But Anne and Margot were gone.
They were in Bergen Bellson, hundreds of miles away.
There was no way to reach them.
But Edith couldn’t accept that.
Or perhaps she simply couldn’t bear to eat knowing her daughters were starving somewhere else.
The psychology of it is unbearable.
In November 1944, Edith felt seriously ill.
She developed a high fever, dysentery probably.
Her body was shutting down.
She was admitted to the sick barracks in Avitz.
The sick barracks was where prisoners went to die.
There was no real medical care, no medicine, just a place to lie down until death came.
Rosa de Winter also became ill.
She was sent to the Durchfall block, the diarrhea barracks, a section for prisoners suffering from dysentery.
One morning in early January 1945, new patients were brought into Rosa’s barracks.
Rosa looked up and she saw Edith Frank.
Rosa later wrote, “Suddenly, I recognized Edith.
She came from another ward.
She was just a ghost.
A few days later, she died totally exhausted.
” January 6th, 1945.
Edith Frank died in the sick barracks of Avitz Burkanau.
She was 44 years old, 10 days before her 45th birthday, 3 weeks before Soviet forces would liberate the camp.
Her body was thrown onto a pile of corpses.
Later, it was either buried in a mass grave or burned.
No individual burial, no marker, no ceremony.
Her husband Otto was alive in the men’s section of Avitz.
He didn’t know she was dead.
He didn’t know his daughters had been sent to Bergen Bellson.
He didn’t know anything.
Her daughter Margot would die in Bergen Bellson in February 1945, probably of Typhus.
Her daughter Anne would die in Bergen Bellson a day or two after Margot.
Her entire family would be dead by mid-February, except Otto.
Otto Frank survived.
When Soviet forces liberated Awitz on January 27th, 1945, Otto was in the sick barracks.
He weighed less than 115 lbs.
He was so weak he could barely walk.
Over the next 3 months, he slowly recovered.
He began the long journey home to Amsterdam.
In March 1945 in Katawis, Poland, he encountered Rosa de Winter Levy.
She was also making her way home.
They recognized each other.
Rosa told him about Edith.
She described her final days.
She told him that Edith had died on January 6th in the sick barracks from exhaustion, from starvation, from weakness.
Rosa later wrote that Edith had died without suffering.
But that was a kind lie.
Edith suffered.
She suffered every moment of those 5 months.
She suffered watching her daughters be taken away.
She suffered starving herself.
She suffered dying alone in a camp infirmary surrounded by strangers.
Otto continued his journey.
In June 1945, he returned to Amsterdam.
He still hoped his daughters were alive.
He wrote letters.
He checked Red Cross lists.
He asked everyone he met if they had seen Anne and Margot.
In July 1945, he learned the truth.
Two sisters, Janney and Lean Brillisiper, who had been in Bergen Bellson with Anne and Margot, confirmed that both girls had died.
Otto Frank was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.
One of the helpers, Meep Geese, gave him Anne’s diary.
She had saved it after the raid, keeping it locked in her desk drawer, waiting to return it to Anne after the war.
Otto began reading and he was shocked.
He had no idea of the depth of Anne’s thoughts, no idea of her observations about human nature, about love, about fear.
He saw a side of his daughter he’d never known.
He also saw her harsh criticisms of Edith.
When Otto decided to edit Anne’s diary for publication, he faced a painful choice.
Anne had written brutal things about her mother.
Should he include them? Should he cut them out of respect for Eda’s memory? He compromised.
He removed some of the most heated comments.
But many of Anne’s criticisms remained in the published version.
And when the diary became famous, when it was adapted into plays and films, Edith Frank was portrayed as an unsympathetic, sarcastic mother who didn’t understand her daughter.
The woman who starved herself to save her children became known to the world as a cold, tactical parent who failed to connect with Anne.
It’s one of history’s crulest ironies.
What people need to understand about Edith Frank’s death is that it wasn’t dramatic.
It wasn’t an execution or a selection for the gas chambers.
It was slow, mundane, bureaucratic.
The Nazis killed Edith Frank through calculated neglect.
They gave her just enough food to keep her alive for labor.
Then they took away her daughters, removing her reason to live.
Then they provided no medical care when she fell ill.
Then they let her waste away in a sick barracks until her body simply stopped.
It took 5 months from September 1944 to January 1945.
5 months of progressive torture.
First the journey to Awitz in a cattle car.
3 days without food or water.
Then the selection, the shaving, the tattooing, the processing designed to strip away humanity.
Then the starvation rations, watery soup, a crust of bread, maybe 800 calories a day when her body needed 2,000.
Then her daughters contracting scabies and being isolated.
Then Edith digging through a barracks wall with her bare hands.
Then giving her food away, starving herself to keep Anne and Margot alive a little longer.
Then watching them be selected for transport.
Screaming, “The children, oh God!” as they disappeared.
Then being marked for the gas chambers multiple times and narrowly escaping.
Then falling ill from starvation, from the cumulative damage.
then being moved to the sick barracks, then lying there alone without her husband, without her daughters, without her family, then dying 10 days before her birthday, 3 weeks before liberation.
That’s how the Holocaust murdered Edith Frank.
But here’s what makes Edith death particularly brutal.
It was preventable.
If Otto’s attempts to immigrate to America had succeeded, they would have escaped.
If the family hadn’t been betrayed, they might have stayed hidden until liberation.
If Edith had eaten her food instead of giving it to her daughters, she might have survived.
If Anne and Margot hadn’t been transferred to Bergen Bellson, Edith might have kept fighting.
If she had been selected for transfer to a labor camp instead of being left at Awitz, she might have lived.
If Soviet forces had liberated Awitz 3 weeks earlier, she would have survived.
If if if none of those things happened.
Instead, Edith Frank died alone at 44.
And almost no one remembers her.
Everyone knows Anne Frank.
Millions of people have read her diary.
Her story is taught in schools worldwide.
Her face is iconic.
But her mother, the woman who gave birth to her, raised her, protected her, starved herself to save her.
She’s a footnote, a supporting character in Anne’s story.
Most people who read the diary come away with a negative impression of Edith.
They see her through Anne’s eyes, cold, critical, unsympathetic.
They don’t see the woman who dug through a barracks wall with her bare hands.
Who gave her food to her children, who died because she couldn’t bear to eat while her daughter starved.
That’s the real Edith Frank.
A woman trapped in a loveless marriage who tried to make the best of it.
A mother who loved her daughters even when one of them rejected her.
A prisoner who sacrificed everything for her children.
a victim who died alone in Awitz while her family was scattered across Nazi camps.
And here’s the most painful part.
When Anne and Margot died in Bergen Bellson in February 1945, they believed their mother was already dead.
Anne told her friends in the camp that her mother had died.
She told them she believed her father was dead, too.
She thought she was alone in the world.
She didn’t know that her father was alive in Achvitz, recovering, surviving.
She died believing she was the last one left.
And she was wrong.
Her father survived.
But her mother, who died a month before Anne, who gave everything to try to save her daughters, who sacrificed her own life for theirs, that part Anne got right.
Edith was dead, and her death accomplished nothing.
Anne and Margot died anyway.
All three Frank women were dead by midFebruary 1945.
Edith’s sacrifice was pointless.
That’s the brutal truth.
The Holocaust didn’t care about maternal love.
It didn’t care about sacrifice.
It didn’t reward selflessness.
It just killed efficiently, systematically.
Edith Frank gave her food to her daughters.
And then she died.
And then her daughters died too.
All three of them murdered by the Nazis.
One by starvation in Awitz, two by typhus in Bergen Bellson.
Rosa Dewinter Levy, the woman who witnessed Eda’s final days, survived Awitz.
She was liberated by Soviet forces on January 27th, 1945.
She made the long journey home to the Netherlands.
She was reunited with her daughter Judic, who had also survived.
In September 1945, just months after the war ended, Rosa published her memoir, Undeas on snapped, escaped the gas chamber.
It was one of the first Holocaust survivor accounts published.
In it, she wrote about her friendship with Edith Frank, about watching Anne and Margot be taken away, about Edith’s final days, about seeing her in the sick barracks, just a ghost, and then watching her die days later.
When Rosa
met Frank during the repatriation journey and told him about Edith’s death, she tried to comfort him.
She said Edith had died from weakness without suffering.
But that was a mercy, a kind lie to soften the blow.
The truth is that Edith Frank suffered immensely.
She suffered every single day of those 5 months.
She suffered emotionally knowing her daughters were gone and she couldn’t protect them.
She suffered physically as starvation destroyed her body.
She suffered psychologically as hope drained away and she realized she would never see her family again.
She suffered in every possible way a human being can suffer.
And then she died.
That’s what happened to Anne Frank’s mother.
The woman everyone forgets.
The woman Anne criticized in her diary.
The woman who history remembers as cold and unsympathetic.
She was none of those things.
She was a mother who loved her daughter so much that she literally starved herself to death trying to save them.
And when we read Anne Frank’s diary and see the harsh criticisms of Edith, we need to remember something.
Anne was 13, 14, 15 years old when she wrote those entries.
She was a teenager.
She saw the world through a teenager’s eyes.
She saw her mother’s flaws, but couldn’t yet see her mother’s sacrifices.
She saw the criticism, but not the love beneath it.
She saw the coldness, but not the pain that caused it.
And she never got the chance to see her mother differently.
She never got the chance to grow up, to mature, to look back and understand.
She died at 15, still seeing her mother as the enemy.
But in the camps, that changed.
Survivors testified that Anne, Margot, and Edith were inseparable at Ashvitz, that they supported each other, that the teenage conflicts disappeared in the face of real horror.
Anne finally saw her mother clearly, finally understood, and then they were separated, and Edith died.
And Anne died believing her mother was gone, never knowing that her sacrifice had been in vain.
What other stories from history should we tell? How do we honor mothers who died trying to save their children? Let us know in the comments and subscribe because these stories matter.
Edith Frank matters.
Every mother who died in the Holocaust matters.
Every sacrifice, every moment of suffering, every death in those camps, it all matters.
We tell these stories not to wallow in misery, but to remember, to bear witness, to ensure that never again means something.
Because the truth is that Edith Frank died on January 6th, 1945 in Avitz Burkanau.
She died of starvation and exhaustion.
She died because she gave her food to her daughters.
She died because she couldn’t bear to live without them.
She died alone, abandoned, forgotten.
And when her daughter’s diary became famous, when Anne Frank became a household name, when millions of people learned about the Holocaust through Anne’s words, Edith was portrayed as the villain of the story, the cold mother, the unsympathetic parent, the woman who didn’t understand her daughter.
That’s the ultimate cruelty.
That’s the final insult.
Edith Frank died trying to save her children, and history remembers her as a bad mother.
If we don’t correct that, if we don’t tell Edith’s story, if we let Anne’s teenage perspective define who her mother was, then we dishonor her memory, we dishonor her sacrifice.
Edith Frank deserves to be remembered for exactly what she was.
A devoted mother, a survivor of a loveless marriage, a woman who tried her best in impossible circumstances, a prisoner who gave everything to protect her children, a victim who died alone in Ashvitz after watching her daughters be taken away.
She deserves the truth.
And the truth is brutal, but it’s the truth.
