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)
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4 Responses
Last May my wife and I had the priviledge of meeting Miep Gies and her son, Paul. Although she no longer meets with people because of her age and health and because her exact living location was kept very private, it was extremely difficult to arrange the meeting. But because of the fact that my wife works at Yad Vashem and the kindness of Paul, he agreed to take us for a tour of were Anne Frank lived in Amsterdam (before she went into hiding) and then took us by bus to have a private audience with his mother, Miep. We spent about a half hour with her but it was lifetime experience. What a wonderful, courageous and yet humble woman.
Miep was a true heroine of one of the darkesat ages in history for our people. H-ashem had rewarded Miep for her tireless efforts to save 2 families, with a lomg and healthy life. She truly deserved the honor of being a Rightious Gentle from Yad VeShem. May she rest in everlasting peace.
She should’ve been awarded and acknowledged in her lifetime for her heroic work.
#3 – She absolutely was. World over.