Acts of courage: Miep Gies
In 1942, as the Nazis began to deport Dutch Jews to concentration camps, an executive at a spice company who had already moved his wife and two daughters from Germany to the Netherlands realized there would be no second chance to run. The family went into hiding instead, living in a suite of rooms concealed on the upper stories of the company’s warehouse at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam, helped by a handful of employees who smuggled them everything from newspapers to potatoes. They hoped to hold out that way until Germany was defeated and the war over.
You know how this story ends, of course. Someone still unknown betrayed the family to the Gestapo, and they all died but the man: Otto Frank. His younger daughter’s diary also survived, and when he finally returned to Amsterdam in 1947, he had it published, giving the world the best-known document of the Holocaust. But we wouldn’t have the Diary of Anne Frank without Otto Frank’s secretary, Miep Gies.
Gies was nearly arrested herself on suspicion of helping the fugitives. She risked her safety again by trying to bribe the Gestapo to let the family go. When that failed, she went back to the Franks’ ransacked hiding place to retrieve their belongings and save them against the day they might, however improbably, return. It was Gies who found Anne’s papers scattered across the floor, gathered them into a suitcase, and kept them — unread! — until she could give them to Otto Frank.
After the war, Gies and her husband, who had also hidden someone in their own home, settled into obscure domesticity for more than 40 years. In 1987, though, an American writer persuaded her to write a memoir, and she became — in her 80s! — a much in-demand speaker for Anne’s diary and against Holocaust denial. Still, as recently as her birthday last winter, Miep Gies modestly maintained that many others had done far more to fight the Nazis than she.
Miep Gies died today, just a few weeks shy of 101, having insisted until the end that she was no hero. With all due respect, I disagree.
Obituary in the New York Times
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I disagree as well — with all due respect, admiration, and gratitude.
me too. i hadn’t seen that she’d died until i read this — what a wonderful woman.