Annette Linzer (née Lederman), 1940-1998) was born on 5 June 1940 in Saint-Gaudens, France to Mordechai (Mordka, 1906-1942) and Reizla (née Zylberszac, 1909-1944) Lederman. Her parents were from Łódź, Poland, but had lived in Belgium and France during the 1930s. In 1941 the family moved back to Brussels, Belgium and Annette’s sister Marguerite (later Marguerite Mishkin, also known as Margo) was born on 8 May 1941. When the round-ups of Jews began in Brussels, Annette's mother made contact with the Belgian underground through a Catholic priest. Annette was placed in hiding with a Christian family, but she was so homesick that her rescuer returned her to her parents. On October 31, 1942, Annette's father was deported to Auschwitz where he perished. Her mother then resolved to hide both girls with a Christian family. She made contact with Clementine (née van Buggenhout) and Eduard Frans, who lived in the village of Rumst, half-way between Brussels and Antwerp. The Frans’s had three older children. Their two sons, Roger and Sylvan, were away most of the time in forced labor battalions, but their teenage daughter, Lydia, helped care for the Lederman sisters. While Annette and Marguerite were in hiding, their mother was deported to Auschwitz on the next to last transport from Belgium in 1944 where she perished.
After learning that both parents had been killed, Clementine and Eduard Frans sought to adopt the girls, but their village priest would not sanction the adoption since there was no formal indication that this would have been the wish of the parents. When it was determined that the girls' sole surviving uncle could not care for them, they were sent to a series of three Jewish orphanages over the next four and a half years. In 1949 plans were made to move their orphanage en masse to Israel as part of the Youth Aliyah program. Annette and her sister boarded the train with their group, but along the way the train was stopped by police who removed the girls. Unbeknownst to the Lederman sisters, they had been officially adopted by Rabbi Leonard and Leah Mishkin of Chicago, Illinois. The girls arrived in Chicago on May 28, 1950 and moved in with their new family. In 1977 Eduard and Clementine Frans were officially recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.
