On this day in 2010, Miep
Gies, the last survivor of a small group of people who helped hide a Jewish
girl, Anne Frank,
and her family from the Nazis during World War II, dies at age
100 in the Netherlands. After the Franks were discovered in 1944 and sent to
concentration camps, Gies rescued the notebooks that Anne Frank left behind
describing her two years in hiding. These writings were later published as
“Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” which became one of the most widely
read accounts of the Holocaust.
Miep Gies was born into a
working-class, Catholic family in Vienna, Austria, on February 15, 1909. At age
11, with food shortages in her native land following World War I, she was sent
to the Netherlands to live with a foster family who nicknamed her Miep (her
birth name was Hermine Santrouschitz). In 1933, she went to work as a secretary
for Otto Frank, who ran a small Amsterdam company that produced a substance
used to make jam. By the following year, Frank’s wife and two daughters, Margot
and Anne, had left their native Germany to join him in the Dutch capital.
In May 1940, the Germans, who
had entered World War II in September of the previous year, invaded the
Netherlands and quickly made life increasingly restrictive and dangerous for
the country’s Jewish population. In early July 1942, the Frank family went into
hiding in an attic apartment behind Otto Frank's business. They were eventually
joined by Otto Frank's business associate and his wife and son, as well as Miep
Gies’ dentist, all of whom were Jewish. Gies, along with her husband Jan, a
Dutch social worker, and several of Otto Frank's other employees risked their
own lives to smuggle food, supplies and news of the outside world into the
secret apartment (which came to be known as the Secret Annex). Gies and her
husband even spent a night in hiding with the group to learn firsthand what it
was like.
On August 4, 1944, after 25
months in hiding, the eight people in the Secret Annex were discovered by the
Gestapo, the German secret state police, who had learned about the hiding place
from an anonymous tipster who has never been definitively identified. Gies was
working in the building at the time of the raid and avoided arrest because the
officer was from her native Vienna and felt sympathy for her. She later went to
police headquarters and tried, unsuccessfully, to pay a bribe to free the
group.
The occupants of the Secret
Annex were sent to concentration camps; only Otto Frank survived. After he was
liberated from Auschwitz by
Soviet troops in January 1945, he returned to Amsterdam, where Miep Gies gave
him a collection of notebooks and several hundred loose papers containing
observations the teenage Anne Frank had penned during her time in hiding. Gies
recovered the materials from the Secret Annex shortly after the Franks' arrest
and hid them in her office desk. She avoided reading the papers during the war
out of respect for Anne’s privacy.
Otto Frank, who lived with the
Gies family after the war, compiled his daughter’s writings into a manuscript
that was first published in the Netherlands in 1947 under the title "Het
Acheterhuis" ("Rear Annex"). Later published in English as
"Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl," the book went on to sell
tens of millions of copies worldwide.
In 1987, Gies published a
memoir, "Anne Frank Remembered," in which she wrote: "I am not a
hero. I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did
what I did and more--much more--during those dark and terrible times years ago,
but always like yesterday in the heart of those of us who bear witness. Never a
day goes by that I do not think of what happened then."
taken from: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/miep-gies-who-hid-anne-frank-dies-at-100 [10.01.2014]
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