Elfriede Geiringer (Fritzi;

née A birth name is the name of a person given upon birth. The term may be applied to the surname, the given name, or the entire name. Where births are required to be officially registered, the entire name entered onto a birth certificate or birth re ...

Markovits; 13 February 1905 – 2 October 1998) was a

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

survivor of

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. She was the second wife of

Otto Frank Otto Heinrich Frank (12 May 1889 – 19 August 1980) was a German businessman who later became a resident of the Netherlands and Switzerland. He was the father of Anne and Margot Frank and husband of Edith Frank, and was the sole member of ...

, who was the father of

Anne Anne, alternatively spelled Ann, is a form of the Latin female given name Anna. This in turn is a representation of the Hebrew Hannah, which means 'favour' or 'grace'. Related names include Annie. Anne is sometimes used as a male name in the ...

and

Margot Frank Margot Betti Frank (16 February 1926 – ) was the elder daughter of Otto Frank and Edith Frank and the elder sister of Anne Frank. Margot's deportation order from the Gestapo hastened the Frank family into hiding. According to the diary of her ...

Biography

Early life

Elfriede Markovits was born in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

, Austria in 1905. She married Erich Geiringer and the couple had two children: son Heinz, born in 1926; and daughter

Eva Eva or EVA may refer to: * Eva (name), a feminine given name Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional characters * Eva (Dynamite Entertainment), a comic book character by Dynamite Entertainment * Eva (''Devil May Cry''), Dante's mother in t ...

, born in 1929. The family fled first to Belgium and then to the Netherlands in 1938, where they settled down as neighbors to the Frank family. Eva and Anne knew each other.

Second World War

When the Germans invaded the Netherlands 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 ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...

. 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. Geiringer and her daughter Eva returned to Amsterdam on 13 June 1945. Otto Frank visited them at their apartment not long after.

Later life

Geiringer married Otto Frank in November 1953 and settled in

Basel , french: link=no, Bâlois(e), it, Basilese , neighboring_municipalities= Allschwil (BL), Hégenheim (FR-68), Binningen (BL), Birsfelden (BL), Bottmingen (BL), Huningue (FR-68), Münchenstein (BL), Muttenz (BL), Reinach (BL), Riehen (BS ...

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

. They spent a large part of their time educating people about the importance of

Anne Frank's diary ''The Diary of a Young Girl'', also known as ''The Diary of Anne Frank'', 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 Netherl ...

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

Anne Frank House The Anne Frank House ( nl, Anne Frank Huis) is a writer's house and biographical museum dedicated to Jewish wartime diarist Anne Frank. The building is located on a canal called the Prinsengracht, close to the Westerkerk, in central Amsterdam ...

in Amsterdam.

Death and since

After living long enough to see the birth of five of her great-grandchildren, Elfriede Geiringer died peacefully in her sleep on 2 October 1998 at her home in London. She is buried along with the ashes of her second husband, Otto in Birsfelden's Cemetery. A memoir by her daughter Eva Schloss, concerning the family's life after the Holocaust, ''After Auschwitz: A Story of Heartbreak and Survival by the Stepsister of Anne Frank'', was published in 2013.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Geiringer, Elfriede 1905 births 1998 deaths Austrian emigrants to the United Kingdom Austrian Jews Auschwitz concentration camp survivors Naturalised citizens of the United Kingdom Jewish concentration camp survivors Anne Frank