January 12, 2010, - 12:05 am
Sad news from Europe. Miep Gies, a heroic Dutch woman who risked her own life to hide Jews during the Holocaust, passed away at age 100. You are probably familiar with her name because Ms. Gies hid the family of Otto Frank, including his daughter, Anne, from the Nazis. And she’s the one who found Anne Frank’s Diary, which lives on worldwide as an important, moving memoir of a young teen girl in hiding.
Miep Gies, RIP
I always paid extra attention to the Anne Frank story and what happened to those who helped the Frank family because my own Holocaust survivor grandfather, who was a concentration camp inmate at Bergen Belsen (where my mother was born), remembered seeing the gaunt, anorexic Anne Frank when he was there toward the end of the Holocaust. This woman, Mrs. Gies, was a saint on earth.
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.
Gies received the Raoul Wallenberg Award for bravery in 1990 and the Order of Merit from Germany in 1994. In Israel, the Yad Vashem memorial pays tribute to Gies as a member of the Righteous Among Nations, a list of non-Jews who helped Jews during the Holocaust. She humbly accepted the accolades, insisting that what she did during those two years wasn’t extraordinary.
“I am not a hero,” Gies wrote in her autobiography, “Anne Frank Remembered” (Simon & Schuster, 1988). “I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did or more — much more — during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always like yesterday in the hearts of those of us who bear witness.”
Actually, most Dutch people did not help the Jews. That’s a myth. And it makes the extraordinary courage of Miep Gies all the more unique and rare.
Gies was born Hermine Santrouschitz to Christian parents on Feb. 15, 1909, in Vienna. Austrians were suffering from a food shortage after World War I, and Gies was sent to Leiden, the Netherlands, as part of a relief program to help malnourished children. She lived with a foster family, who gave her the name Miep, believing that Hermine was too formal.
In 1933, she heard about an opening as an office assistant for Otto Frank, who had just moved to Amsterdam with his family from Germany. Gies took the job and became good friends with Otto Frank, his wife, Edith, and their two daughters, Margot and Anne.
The German occupation of the Netherlands began in May 1940, and soon after the Nazis shut down Jewish newspapers, fired Jewish civil servants and barred Jewish children from public schools. Having lived in Germany, Otto Frank knew the situation would only get worse. In the spring of 1942, Miep recalled in a 1998 interview, Frank called her into his office and told her of his plan:
“He said, ‘Sit down, Miep, I have to tell you something very important. It’s really sort of secret. We’re planning on going into hiding here, in this building. Are you prepared to help us, to bring us food?’ I answered yes, of course.”
The entrance to the back annex was hidden by a moving bookcase. It consisted of two floors and an attic that was accessible by ladder.
Gies fetched paper, vegetables and meat for the Franks and the four other Jews — Hermann and Auguste van Pels, their son, Peter, and Fritz Pfeffer — making sure to visit several shops to avoid suspicion. The other office workers bought milk and bread and kept the food-products business going. Gies developed a bond with Anne Frank, who was 13 when she went into hiding. She is mentioned several times in the diary.
“Miep has so much to carry she looks like a pack mule,” Anne wrote. “She goes forth nearly every day to scrounge up vegetables, and then bicycles back with her purchases in large shopping bags. She’s also the one who brings five library books with her every Saturday.”
Gies said she never knew who betrayed the Franks. Suspicion fell on a co-worker, she said, but an official investigation found no evidence. As for her own fate, Gies said she was lucky that the supervising officer was from her hometown of Vienna. . . .
Otto Frank lived with Miep and Jan Gies for seven years after the war. He died in 1980.
What an incredibly brave woman. Her righteous acts in risking her own life to save others will not be forgotten. And certainly, she has more than earned her place in heaven.
Miep Gies, Woman of Valor, Rest in Peace.
Tags: Anne Frank, Bergen Belsen, Diary of Anne Frank, Dutch, heroic woman, Holland, Holocaust, Miep Gies, Nazis, Netherlands, Otto Frank, Rest In Peace, righteous gentile, World War II