The eldest of the 11 children of Friedrich Michel and Lena Reiwit was Marcus Michel, who was born on 19 September 1884 at Zandstraat 21 in Amsterdam. Marcus became a bookkeeper and later labeled as an office clerk. Marcus was unmarried.
At the beginning of May 1930, Marcus moved from his parental home to 2e Jan Steenstraat 11, 2nd floor, where he lived in with the widow Buijsman. Before that, he lived at Lange Houtstraat 26 in Amsterdam, where his father Friedrich Michel had died on 23 March 1931.
On 24 June 1932 he returned to his widowed mother, but on 4 May 1936 he left again from there, to Plantage Parklaan 10, where he found residence with the Hendrik de Kleijn family. Nevertheless, a few months later he went back to his mother, who lived alone at Tugelaweg 91 1st floor in Amsterdam-East since October 1936.
Marcus was a gifted man. He once translated a speech into French for the then minister Postuma. He spoke a large number of languages, including French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Swedish and it is not inconceivable that he will also have spoken Yiddish. Between 1907 and 1914 Marcus lived in Paris; he worked, among other things, for the gammophone record company Pathé. He has also worked in banking and for Centraal Beheer. He also attended the Israelitisch Semenarium and was also the guardian of Fred Michel, (Friedrich or Frederik) the son of his sister Rebecca Michel.
During the large-scale raids at the beginning of October 1942, Marcus Michel was arrested and taken to Westerbork, where he was brought in between 3 and 5 October. There was great chaos there, partly because of the influx of Jewish forced laborers from the Jewish labor camps in the Northern Netherlands, which were liquidated on 2 October 1942.
The few entries on his Jewish Council registration card indicate that he was deported to Auschwitz on 16 October 1942. This transport, with a total of 1710 deportees, made a stopover in Cosel, a town ±80 km west of Auschwitz. There, 570 boys and men between the ages of 15 and 50 were forced to leave the train to be employed as forced laborers in the surrounding labor camps in Upper Silesia.
The then 58-year-old Marcus Michel was not one of them - he was sent to Auschwitz with the elderly, sick and weak, children, women with children, etc., where they were immediately murdered on arrival on October 19, 1942 in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Birkenau .
Sources include the City Archive of Amsterdam, family registration cards of Friedrich Michel and Marcus Michel; archive card of Marcus Michel; Amsterdam residence cards of 2e Jan Steenstraat 11 and Plantage Parklaan 10 with Marcus Michel; the file cabinet of the Jewish Council, registration cards of Marcus Michel; the Wikipedia website Jodentransporten vanuit Amsterdam.nl and family history from a surviving familymember.