Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who helped hide Anne Frank’s family from the Nazis and discovered the teenage girl’s now-famous diary, has died. She was 100.

She died today after a short illness, her authorized Web site reported. She lived in the Dutch province of Noord-Holland.

Gies was the last survivor of a group of co-workers who hid the Frank family and four other Jews in a secret annex of an Amsterdam office building owned by Anne’s father, Otto. From July 6, 1942, until Aug. 4, 1944, Gies, her husband, Jan, and the other helpers risked arrest and possible death by providing the Jews with food, supplies, news and a link to the outside world.

After the Gestapo raided the annex and sent the Franks and the others in hiding to concentration camps, Gies and a fellow worker, Bep Voskuijl, sifted through the debris and found Anne’s cloth-covered diary. Gies hid it in a desk drawer until after the war, hoping to return it to its young author.

Upon learning that Anne and her sister, Margot, died at Bergen-Belsen, Gies gave the diary to Otto Frank, the only family member who survived the camps. He published it in 1947.

Today, “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” a memoir of the Holocaust, is one of the most widely read books in schools around the world. It has been translated from Dutch into 67 languages and made into a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, an opera and 1959 film.

After the book was published, Gies devoted the rest of her life to keeping the memory of Anne Frank alive. She traveled to dozens of countries, gave speeches at schools and always responded personally to letters from children. Every Aug. 4, she marked the day her friends were taken away by staying indoors with the curtains drawn.

(Source: Business Week / Bloomberg News)