Elfriede Geiringer was a Jewish survivor of the Second World War. She was the second wife of Otto Frank

Otto Frank

Otto Heinrich "Pim" Frank was a German-born businessman and the father of Anne Frank and Margot Frank...

, the father of Anne

Anne Frank

Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank is one of the most renowned and most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Acknowledged for the quality of her writing, her diary has become one of the world's most widely read books, and has been the basis for several plays and films.Born in the city of Frankfurt...

 and Margot Frank

Margot Frank

Margot Betti Frank was the older sister of Anne Frank, whose deportation order from the Gestapo hastened the Frank family into hiding, and who subsequently perished in Bergen-Belsen...

.

Early life

Elfriede Markovits was born in Vienna, Austria, on February 13, 1905. She married Erich Geiringer and the couple had two children: a son, Heinz, born in 1926, and a daughter, Eva, born on May 11, 1929. The family fled first to Belgium and then to the Netherlands in 1938, where they settled down as neighbours to the Frank family. Eva and Anne knew each through mutual friends.

Second World War

When the Germans invaded Holland and Heinz received a call-up to a work-camp, the family went into hiding. They successfully hid for two years and might have survived the war if they had not been betrayed in May 1944. They were then captured by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp

Auschwitz concentration camp

Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...

. They were liberated in January 1945 by the Russians, but Erich and Heinz Geiringer had perished in the forced march to Mauthausen that came just before the war ended. Elfriede and her daughter Eva returned to Amsterdam on June 13, 1945. Otto Frank visited them at their apartment not long after.

Later life

Elfriede Geiringer and Otto Frank married in November 1953 and settled in Basel

Basel

Basel or Basle In the national languages of Switzerland the city is also known as Bâle , Basilea and Basilea is Switzerland's third most populous city with about 166,000 inhabitants. Located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany...

, Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

. They spent a large part of their time educating people about the importance of Anne Frank's diary

The Diary of a Young Girl

The Diary of a Young Girl is a book of the writings from the Dutch language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944 and Anne Frank ultimately died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen...

 and the horrors that the Jews experienced during the Holocaust. Their commitment led to the creation of the Anne Frank House

Anne Frank House

The Anne Frank House on Prinsengracht canal in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is a museum dedicated to Jewish wartime diarist Anne Frank, who hid from Nazi persecution with her family and four other people in hidden rooms at the rear of the building...

in Amsterdam.

Death and afterward

After living long enough to see the birth of five of her great grandchildren, Elfriede Frank died peacefully in her sleep on October 2, 1998 at her home in London.