Edith was the youngest of four children, having been born into a German-Jewish family Aachen, Germany. Her father, Abraham Holländer was a successful businessman in industrial equipment and was prominent in the Aachen Jewish community as was her mother, Rosa Stern. She met Otto Frank in 1924 and they got married on his thirty-sixth birthday, 12 May 1925, at Aachen's synagogue. Their first daughter, Morgot, was born in Frankfort on 16 February 1926, followed by Anne, who was born on 12 June 1929. The rise of Antisemitism and the introduction of discriminatory laws in Germany forced the family to emigrate to Amsterdam in 1933, where Otto established a branch of his spice and pectin distribution company. Her brothers Walter and Julius ecaped to the United states in 1938, and Rosa Holländer-Stern left Aachen in 1939 to join the Frank family in Amsterdam. Edith's sister, Bettina Hollander had died earlier at the age of sixteen due to appendicitis when Edith was just 14.
In 1940 the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and began their persecution of the country's Jews. Edith's children were removed from their schools, and her husband had to resign his business to his Dutch colleagues Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler, who helped the family when they went into hiding at the company premises in 1942.
The two-year period the Frank family spent in hiding with four other people their neighbours Hermann Van Pels, his wife and son, and Miep Gies's dentist Fritz Pfeffer was famously chronicled in Anne Frank's posthumously published diary, which ended three days before they were anonymously betrayed and arrested on 4 August 1944. After detainment in the Gestopo headquarters on the Euterpestraat and three days in prison on the Amstelveenweg, Edith and those with whom she had been in hiding were transported to the Westerbork concentration camp. From here they were deported to Fritz Pfeffer on 3 September 1944, the