Edith Hollander was born in Aachen on January 16, 1900. She has two older brothers, named Julius (1894) and Walter (1898). The Hollander family celebrates the Jewish holidays and keeps a kosher household. The Hollanders are leading members of Aachen's Jewish community, father Hollander trades in scarp metal and owns several industrial processing plants. She met Otto Frank in 1924 and they got married on his thirty-sixth birthday, May 12, 1926, at Aachen's synagogue. Their first daughter, Margot was born in Frankfurt on February 16, 1926, followed by Anne, who was born on June 12, 1929. When Otto Frank decided to edit his daughter's diary for publication, he was sure that his wife had come in for particular criticism because of her often disagreeable relationship with Anne, and cut some of the heated comments out of respect for his wife and other residents of the Secret Annex. Nevertheless, Anne's portrait of an unsympathetic and sarcastic mother was duplicated in the dramatizations of the book, which was counted by the memories those who had known her as a modest, distant woman who tried to treat her adolescent children as her equals. In 1999, the discovery of previously unknown pages excised by Otto showed that Anne had discerned that although Edith very much loved Otto, Otto- though very devoted to Edith, was not in love with her, and this understanding was leading Anne to develop a new sense of empathy for her mother's situation. By the time Edith and her daughters were in Auschwitz, Bloeme Evers-Emden, an Auschwitz survivor interviewed by Willy Lindwer in The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, observed that "they were always together, mother and daughters. It is certain that they gave each other a great deal of support. All the things a teenager might think of her mother were no longer any significance." On which Edith Frank died on January 6, 1945, ten days before her 45th birthday.