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)