Mrs. Frank was born Edith Hollander, and her family came from Aachen, a town on Germany's western border, near Belgium. Like her husband, she came from the comfortable middle classes and was accustomed to a life of relative ease, with most of the work in the house being done by servants. Her husband was eleven years older than she was, being thirty-six to her twenty-five when they were married in 1925. They lived in Frankfurt-on-Main, Germany, and their daughters, Margot and Anne, were born in 1926 and 1929, respectively. When the Nazis came to power, in 1933, and the persecution of the Jews of Germany began, the Franks moved to Holland.
For seven years, the Franks lived peacefully and prosperously in Amsterdam, but things changed when the Nazis invaded and occupied Holland in 1940. The Franks tried to continue living a normal life under the Nazi regime, but this became increasingly difficult, and in the summer of 1942, they went into hiding.
In the "Secret Annexe," Mrs. Frank was obliged to perform various tasks which she had not formerly been accustomed to doing. In addition, she was living in cramped quarters, together with her family and another four people. This obviously was not easy for her, and possibly much of the bad feeling between Anne and her mother may have been due to this and the effect that the cramped living conditions had on everyone's nerves.
