Miep Gies, Anne Frank Protector, Dies at 100

Her own words...

I am not a hero

'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. Never a day goes by that I do not think of what happened then.'

From her website, in her own words...

'I am one hundred years old now. That is an admirable age, and I have even reached it in fairly good health. So then it's fair to say you've been fortunate, and being fortunate seems to be the red thread running through my life.'

''I don't want to be considered a hero,'' she said in a 1997 online chat with schoolchildren.

''Imagine young people would grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty. I am afraid nobody would ever help other people, because who is a hero? I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary.''

Born Hermine Santrouschitz on Feb. 15, 1909 in Vienna, Gies moved to Amsterdam in 1922 to escape food shortages in Austria. She lived with a host family who gave her the nickname Miep.

In 1933, Gies took a job as an office assistant in the spice business of Otto Frank. After refusing to join a Nazi organization in 1941, she avoided deportation to Austria by marrying her Dutch boyfriend, Jan Gies.

As the Nazis ramped up their arrests and deportations of Dutch Jews, Otto Frank asked Gies in July 1942 to help hide his family in the annex above the company's canal-side warehouse on Prinsengracht 263 and to bring them food and supplies.

''I answered, 'Yes, of course.' It seemed perfectly natural to me. I could help these people. They were powerless, they didn't know where to turn,'' she said years later.

Jan and Miep Gies worked with four other employees in the firm to sustain the Franks and four other Jews sharing the annex. Jan secured extra food ration cards from the underground resistance. Miep cycled around the city, alternating grocers to ward off suspicions from this highly dangerous activity.

In her e-mail to the AP last February, Gies remembered her husband, who died in 1993, as one of Holland's unsung war heroes. ''He was a resistance man who said nothing but did a lot. During the war he refused to say anything about his work, only that he might not come back one night. People like him existed in thousands but were never heard,'' she wrote.

Touched by Anne's precocious intelligence and loneliness, Miep also brought Anne books and newspapers while remembering everybody's birthdays and special days with gifts.

''It seems as if we are never far from Miep's thoughts,'' Anne wrote.

In her own book, ''Anne Frank Remembered,'' Gies recalled being in the office when the German police, acting on a tip that historians have failed to trace, raided the hide-out in August 1944.

A policeman opened the door to the main office and pointed a revolver at the three employees, telling them to sit quietly. ''Bep, we've had it,'' Gies whispered to Bep Voskuijl.

After the arrests, she went to the police station to offer a bribe for the Franks' release, but it was too late. On Aug. 8, they were sent to Westerbork, a concentration camp in eastern Holland from where they were later packed into cattle cars and deported to Auschwitz. A few months later, Anne and her sister Margot were transported to Bergen-Belsen.

Two of the helpers, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman, were sent to labor camps, but survived the war.

Around 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands before the 1940-45 Nazi occupation. Of those, 107,000 were deported to Germany and only 5,200 survived. Some 24,000 Jews went into hiding, of which 8,000 were hunted down or turned in.

After the war, Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam and lived with the Gies family until he remarried in 1952. Miep worked for him as he compiled the diary, then devoted herself to talking about the diary and answering piles of letters with questions from around the world.

After Otto Frank's death in 1980, Gies continued to campaign against Holocaust-deniers and to refute allegations that the diary was a forgery.

She suffered a stroke in 1997 which slightly affected her speech, but she remained generally in good health as she approached her 100th birthday.

Her son Paul Gies said last year she was still receiving ''a sizable amount of mail'' which she handled with the help of a family friend. She spent her days at the apartment where she lived since 2000 reading two daily newspapers and following television news and talk shows.

Her husband died in 1993.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/11/world/AP-EU-Netherlands-Obit-Miep-Gie...

Miep Gies, Who Helped Hide Anne Frank, Dies at 100

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 11, 2010

Filed at 8:39 p.m. ET

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) -- Miep Gies, the office secretary who defied the Nazi occupiers to hide Anne Frank and her family for two years and saved the teenager's diary, has died, the Anne Frank Museum said Tuesday. She was 100.

Gies' Web site reported that she died Monday after a brief illness. The report was confirmed by museum spokeswoman Maatje Mostar, but she gave no details. The British Broadcasting Corp. said she died in a nursing home after suffering a fall last month.

Gies was the last of the few non-Jews who supplied food, books and good cheer to the secret annex behind the canal warehouse where Anne, her parents, sister and four other Jews hid for 25 months during World War II.

After the apartment was raided by the German police, Gies gathered up Anne's scattered notebooks and papers and locked them in a drawer for her return after the war. The diary, which Anne Frank was given on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life in hiding from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944.

Gies refused to read the papers, saying even a teenager's privacy was sacred. Later, she said if she had read them she would have had to burn them because they incriminated the ''helpers.''

Anne Frank died of typhus at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, just two weeks before the camp was liberated. Gies gave the diary to Anne's father Otto, the only survivor, who published it in 1947.

After the diary was published, Gies tirelessly promoted causes of tolerance. She brushed aside the accolades for helping hide the Frank family as more than she deserved -- as if, she said, she had tried to save all the Jews of occupied Holland.

''This is very unfair. So many others have done the same or even far more dangerous work,'' she wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press days before her 100th birthday last February.

''The Diary of Anne Frank'' was the first popular book about the Holocaust, and has been read by millions of children and adults around the world in some 65 languages.

For her courage, Gies was bestowed with the ''Righteous Gentile'' title by the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem. She has also been honored by the German Government, Dutch monarchy and educational institutions.

Nevertheless, Gies resisted being made a character study of heroism for the young.

CONTINUED...

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-11/miep-gies-dutch-woman-who-found-anne...

Miep Gies, Dutch Woman Who Found Anne Frank Diary, Dies at 100

By Mark Schoifet

Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) -- 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.

‘Not a Hero’

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.”

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.

‘Sit Down, Miep’

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 f

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/01/miep_gies_helped_protect_anne.html

From her website:

On Monday evening, January 11, Miep Gies deceased after a short illness. She has become 100 years.