Photo: DAMIR SENCAR / AFP / Getty Images
Miep Gies was born into a working-class Catholic family in Vienna, Austria, on February 1909.
To the 11 years, due to food shortages in their homeland after World War I, she was sent to the Netherlands to live with a foster family. This she nicknamed Miep (her birth name was Hermine Santrouschitz).
In 1933, she went to work as Otto Frank’s secretary, who ran a small company in Amsterdam that produced a substance used to make jam. 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 Holland and quickly made life increasingly restrictive and dangerous for the country’s Jewish population.
Early July 1942, the Frank family hid in an attic behind their business. Finally, they were joined by his business partner with his wife and son, as well as the dentist from Miep Gies, all of whom are Jewish.
Gies, along with her husband Jan, a laborer Dutch social worker, and several of Otto Frank’s other employees risked their own lives to smuggle food, supplies and news from the outside world into the secret apartment (which came to be known as the Secret Annex).
August 4, 1944, after 25 hidden months, the eight people in the Annex Secret were discovered by the Gestapo, the secret police of the German state, who had found out about the hiding place from an anonymous informant 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. He later went to the 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 Soviet troops liberated him from Auschwitz in January 1940, he returned to Amsterdam, where Miep Gies gave him a collection of notebooks and several hundred loose papers containing observations that the teenage Anne Frank
had written during his time in hiding.
Gies recovered the Secret Annex materials shortly after the Franks’ arrest and hid them in her office desk. He avoided reading the newspapers during the war out of respect for Anne’s privacy.
Otto Frank, who lived with the Gies family after the war, compiled her daughter’s writings into a manuscript which was first published in the Netherlands at 1947 with the title “Het Achterhuis” (“Back Annex”). Later published as “Anne Frank: A Girl’s Diary”, the book sold 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 am at the end of the long, long list of good Dutch people who did what I did and more, much more, during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always as yesterday in the hearts of those of us who are witnesses. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about what happened then.”
The 11 of January of 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, died at 25 years in the Netherlands.
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