Meip Gies, the woman who hid Anne Frank & found her diary, died today at the age of 100. She risked her life to hide the Franks, but was remained very modest because she wanted others to believe that anyone can do courageous things. Anne died just two weeks before her prison camp was liberated. "Never give up just before the miracle happ...ens" is by far my favorite slogan. Who are we to say what the miracle is? The diary was the miracle.
Here is what the press reported:
AMSTERDAM: Miep Gies, the secretary who defied the Nazis to hide Anne Frank and her family and save the Jewish teenager's diary, has died at the age of 100. Gies' website said yesterday that she died on Monday after a brief illness. She died in a nursing home after suffering a fall last month, reports said. Gies was the last of the few non-Jews who supplied food, books and good cheer to the secret annex behind the canal warehouse where Anne, her parents, sister and four other Jews hid for 25 months during World War II. After the apartment was raided by the German police, Gies gathered up Anne's scattered notebooks and papers and locked them in a drawer for her return after the war. The diary, which Anne Frank was given on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life in hiding from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944.
Gies refused to read the papers, saying even a teenager's privacy was sacred. Later, she said if she had read them, she would have had to burn them because they incriminated the "helpers".
Anne Frank died of typhus at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, just two weeks before the camp was liberated. Gies gave the diary to Anne's father, Otto, the only survivor, who published it in 1947. After the diary was published, Gies tirelessly promoted causes of tolerance. She brushed aside the accolades for helping hide the Frank family as more than she deserved - as if, she said, she had tried to save all the Jews of occupied Holland.
"This is very unfair. So many others have done the same or even far more dangerous work," she wrote days before her 100th birthday in February last year. The Diary of Anne Frank was the first popular book about the Holocaust, and has been read by millions of children and adults around the world in about 65 languages. For her courage, Gies was bestowed with the "Righteous Gentile" title by the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem. She has been honoured by the German government, Dutch monarchy and educational institutions. Nevertheless, Gies resisted becoming a character study of heroism for the young.
"I don't want to be considered a hero," she said in a 1997 online chat with schoolchildren. "Imagine young people would grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty. I am afraid nobody would ever help other people, because who is a hero? I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary."
Born Hermine Santrouschitz on February 15, 1909, in Vienna, Gies moved to Amsterdam in 1922 to escape food shortages in Austria. She lived with a host family who gave her the nickname Miep. In 1933, Gies took a job as an office assistant in the spice business of Otto Frank. After refusing to join a Nazi organisation in 1941, she avoided deportation to Austria by marrying her Dutch boyfriend, Jan Gies.
As the Nazis ramped up their arrests and deportations of Dutch Jews, Otto Frank asked Gies in July 1942 to help hide his family in the annex above the company's warehouse on Prinsengracht 263 and to bring them supplies. "I answered, `Yes, of course.' It seemed perfectly natural to me. I could help these people. They were powerless, they didn't know where to turn," she said years later.
Jan and Miep Gies worked with four other employees in the firm to sustain the Franks and four other Jews sharing the annex. Jan secured extra ration cards from the resistance. Miep cycled around the city, alternating grocers to ward off suspicions about this dangerous activity. Gies remembered her husband, who died in 1993, as one of The Netherlands' unsung war heroes. "He was a resistance man who said nothing but did a lot," she said last year. "During the war, he refused to say anything about his work, only that he might not come back one night. People like him existed in thousands but were never heard." Gies is survived by her son and three grandchildren. AP
