Like Anne Frank, Hilde Jacobsthal was born in Germany and brought up in Amsterdam, where the two families became close. Unlike Anne Frank, she survived the war, and Otto Frank was to become godfather to Rita, her first daughter.?I am the child of a woman who survived the Holocaust not by the skin of her teeth but heroically. This book tells the story of my mother's dramatic life before, during and after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940.?I wrote Motherland because I wanted to understand a story which had become a kind of family myth. My mother's life could be seen as.