Otto Frank

Frank married his first wife Edith Hollander in 1925. The couple was together until Hollander’s death in the horrific concentration camps. They had two children together - Margot and Anne.

He remarried in 1953 to Fritzi Markovits and the couple shifted to Switzerland for good. They lived there until their death. Frank died in 1980 in Basel, Switzerland, due to lung cancer.

Otto Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, to Michael Frank and Alice Betty Frank. He was born in a Jewish family and had three other siblings—Robert, Herbert and Helene Frank.

After finishing his high school studies in Germany, Frank pursued art history at the University of Heidelberg.

Frank did a job at a local bank for a year and side by side he started pursuing economics at a university. It was around this time that he got an opportunity to work in Manhattan, New York.

An internship at Macy’s Department store in New York was arranged for him. He became very excited about this opportunity and left for New York but sudden death of his father required him to come back after two weeks.

After attending the funeral, Frank again headed back to New York to make a decent living there. He spent two years working there; he worked at the Macy’s and then secured a position at a bank.

In 1911, Frank returned back to his homeland and started working in a company that manufactured window frames and later during World War I, he took up a job with a manufacturer of horseshoes for the German army.

Soon, Frank was taken into the German Military in 1914 and was stationed at the Western front where he earned the rank of lieutenant. After the war ended, he returned back to his normal civilian life.

Frank’s life’s most important work has been editing his daughter Anne’s dairy into a manuscript for its subsequent publication in 1946. He considered it imperative that the world should feel the pain of the Jews through his daughter’s words.