Miep Gies in 1998

Miep Gies has died at the age of 100 on January 11 in Hoorn, The Netherlands;  she was born in 1909 in Vienna as Hermine Santrouschitz before moving to Amsterdam in the early 1920s and marrying Jan Gies in 1941.

Miep Gies helped hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis for two years in a secret annex of a house on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. She also saved Anne’s diaries from destruction, allowing the world a glimpse into the day-to-day realities of Jews during World War II. Of the numerous people who helped the Frank family avoid deportation for two years from July 1942 to August 1944, Miep Gies was the last one still alive.

Despite the heroic efforts of Gies and the others,  a tip off by persons unknown allowed theNazis to raid the Frank’s hiding place on the morning of Aug. 4, 1944 and deport  its residents to Auschwitz. Anne Frank, spared immediate death in the Auschwitz gas chambers, died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen camp just weeks before the end of World War II. She was only 15. Miep Gies recovered Anne’s dairies after the raid and gave them to Otto Frank – Anne’s father and the only member of the Frank family to survive the war — upon his return and he published them in 1947.

Of all the European countries, the Netherlands – together with Poland and Greece – fared the worst as a result of the Holocaust in terms of a decline in their Jewish populations.  The Netherlands lost 75% of its Jewish population, with the Nazis deporting more than 105,000 people primarily to Auschwitz en Sobibor between 1940 and 1945, leaving roughly 35,000 Jewish survivors between those who remained hidden during the war and those who managed to find their way back from the death camps after 1945.

In 1994, Gies was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany as well as the Wallenberg Medal by the University of Michigan. The following year, Gies received the Yad Vashem Righteous Among the Nations medal. In 1997, she was knighted in the Order of Orange-Nassau by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. The minor planet 99949 Miepgies is named in her honor. She always maintained that while she appreciated the honors, they embarrassed her:

“I am not a hero. I am not a special person. I don’t want attention. I did what any decent person would have done.”

On 30 July 2009, the Austrian Ambassador to the Netherlands, Wolfgang Paul, presented Grand Decoration of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria to Gies at her home.

Anne Frank House today – museum on the right across from the Westerkerk.

The Diary of Anne Frank is a 1959 film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name that was partly filmed at the actual building at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family were hiding until they were betrayed and shipped off to Auschwitz. 

As it happens, in the summer of 1958 I was in Amsterdam looking for jazz records at a 2nd hand store on the Prinsengracht when I noticed a crowd  of onlookers in front  of one of the buildings on the other side of the canal. Someone told me then that they were making a movie about Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who had lived there during the war. 

I must admit I have never read the Anne Frank’s Diaries – but one day I will summon up the courage for it, to read them in the context of a time really not all that long ago, dominated by those who thought that she should be hunted down and exterminated because for what she was. And what else could a 15 year old girl be? Someone’s sweet daughter –  nothing more and nothing less – capable of innocent hopes and dreams only, until her life was stolen from her through a state-sanctioned act of unimaginable savagery:

Anne Frank was discovered, seized, and deported; she and her mother and sister and millions of others were extinguished in a program calculated to assure the cruellest and most demonically inventive human degradation. The atrocities she endured were ruthlessly and purposefully devised, from indexing by tattoo through systematic starvation to factory-efficient murder. She was designated to be erased from the living, to leave no grave, no sign, no physical trace of any kind.

 Her fault—her crime—was having been born a Jew, and as such she was classified among those who had no right to exist: not as a subject people, not as an inferior breed, not even as usable slaves. The military and civilian apparatus of an entire society was organized to obliterate her as a contaminant, in the way of a noxious and repellent insect. Zyklon B, the lethal fumigant poured into the gas chambers, was, pointedly, a roach poison.

Anne Frank escaped gassing. One month before liberation, not yet sixteen, she died of typhus fever, an acute infectious disease carried by lice. (Excerpted from an article by Cynthia Ozick, The New Yorker Magazine,  September 28, 1997)

Burka

How much of an anachronism an ancient tribal culture or religion can be in today’s world  was demonstrated recently in Amsterdam, when its Mayor Job Cohen said that women who refuse to give up wearing the burka for jobs should have unemployment benefits cut.

The view here is that – clearly –  it really isn’t fair to expect local taxpayers to support individuals financially who, because of their beliefs or lifestyles, render themselves essentially unemployable. If – in the case of the burka – an individual has been ordered (I would call it “condemned”)  by their culture or religion to walk around with a bag over their head – then the consequences of that action (such as limited employability) should be born not by the Dutch taxpayer – but by the individuals who have chosen to live that way. That position seems entirely reasonable to me.

Of course, to cut these folk’s off the government’s payroll will result in cries of discrimination by those who seem to attribute some innate value to whatever belief someone might come up with that makes them dress up that way. In addition, some will claim that this is just another move to try to ban a specific religious group.

But such an attack clearly misses the point being made here, as this is not about banning religious groups or what they do to themselves to give expression to it. This is about restricting your employability while being on government financial support – support that is being extended to you on the assumption that you make every reasonable effort to find employment. And if everyone can play by these rules, such a system is fair and equitable, and I would have no issue contributing to such a system.

Now, there are situations where people are restricted to certain kinds of employment because they have a disability or sorts, or some other kind of condition that is beyond their control – i.e., there is nothing they can do about it. However, in the case of following some bizarre religious or cultural custom that is limiting your employability – such as having to hide your face in public – well, that is still a matter of choice in the Netherlands (as it would be in any democracy). But then you would have to face the consequences of such an act, such as the fact that very few people would want to hire you.

And that is not an act of discrimination – the usual red herring that gets thrown around here – but the fact that what you are doing is incompatible with the prevailing culture.  In the West we like to look each other in the face, and this is an essential component of our social interaction. Putting value in that is not discriminatory, but an essential part of what it means to live in an open democratic society. That means we all have rights, not just those who come here to ride roughshod over the most common rules of established social interaction.