Miep Gies, protector of Anne Frank

Published on Friday 15 January 2010 21:43

Born: 15 February, 1909, in Vienna. Died: 11 January, 2010, in the Netherlands, aged 100.

MIEP Gies was the last survivor of Anne Frank's protectors and the woman who preserved the diary that endures as a testament to the human spirit in the face of unfathomable evil.

Gies sought no accolades for joining with her husband and three others in hiding Anne Frank, her father, mother and older sister and four other Dutch Jews for 25 months in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. But she came to be viewed as a courageous figure when her role was revealed with the publication of her memoir. In her 80s, she then travelled the world speaking against intolerance. The West German government presented her with its highest civilian medal in 1989, and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands knighted her in 1996.

When the Gestapo raided the hiding place in the annex of Otto Frank's office on 4 August, 1944, and arrested its eight occupants, it left behind his daughter's diary and writings. The journals recounted life in those rooms behind a movable bookcase and the hopes of a girl on the brink of womanhood. Gies gathered up those writings and hid them, unread, hoping Anne would someday return to claim them.

But when Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam at the end of the war, having been liberated from Auschwitz, he was the only survivor of the family. Anne had died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp three months before her 16th birthday. Her sister, Margot, died there aged 19 and their mother, Edith, died at Auschwitz.

Gies gave Anne's writings to Mr Frank, and they were published in the Netherlands in 1947 in an abridged version. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl has since been translated into dozens of languages in several editions, read by millions and adapted for the stage and screen.

But Gies remained largely anonymous until an American writer, Alison Leslie Gold, persuaded her to tell her story.

Miep Gies was born Hermine Santrouschitz, to a Catholic family in Vienna. Aged 11, she was sent to Leiden to be cared for by a Dutch family, one of many Austrian children suffering from food shortages in the wake of the First World War. She was given the Dutch nickname Miep and later adopted by the family.

When she was 13, the family moved to Amsterdam, and in 1933 she became a secretary to Otto Frank, who was overseeing the Dutch branch of a German company selling an ingredient for jam. Mr Frank had fled Hitler's Germany, and he was soon joined by his wife and daughters.

Gies became a trusted employee and friend of the family. In May 1940, the Netherlands fell to the Nazis. In July 1942, when thousands of Dutch Jews were being deported to concentration camps, the Frank family went into hiding. Mr Frank asked Gies if she would help shelter them, and she unhesitatingly agreed.

The annex became a hiding place not only for the Franks but for three members of a family named van Pels and Gies's dentist, Fritz Pfeffer.

Having married a Dutch social worker, Jan Gies, in 1941, Miep Gies joined him and three other employees of Mr Frank's business in sheltering the eight Jews and caring for their daily needs. The protectors risked death if caught.

Gies, while continuing to work for Mr Frank's business, which remained open under figurehead Christian management, played a central role in caring for the hidden. She found food for them, brought books and news of the outside world and provided emotional support, bringing Anne her first pair of high-heeled shoes and baking a holiday cake. On one occasion, Miep and Jan Gies spent a night in the annex to experience the terror there for themselves.

When the Gestapo raided the hiding place – tipped off by someone unknown to this day – Gies was working in the building. But one of the Nazi agents spared her from arrest, probably in light of their common Austrian heritage.

After the war Gies lived quietly in Amsterdam as a homemaker. But on publication of her memoir, she began to travel widely as a living link to Anne Frank and spoke on the lessons of the Holocaust. A small woman whose hair had turned white, she bore a single remembrance of those days in the hiding place, a black onyx ring with a diamond. It was a gift from Auguste von Pels, one of the doomed Jews she had sheltered.

Every 4 August, the anniversary of the raid on the annex, Miep and Jan Gies remained at home. They withdrew from the world and reflected on the lost.

In her memoir, Gies told of her emotions when she finally read the diary. She wrote: "

Every day of my life, I've wished that things had been different. That even had Anne's diary been lost to the world, Anne and the others might somehow have been saved."

Jan Gies died in 1993. Miep Gies is survived by her son and three grandchildren.