Miep Geis Obit

When the Gestapo raided the hiding place in the annex to Otto Frank’s business office on Aug. 4, 1944, and arrested its eight occupants, it left behind his daughter Anne’s diary and her writings on loose sheets of papers.

Anne Frank had died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp three months before her 16th birthday.

Mrs. Gies sought no accolades for joining with her husband and three others in hiding Anne Frank, her father, mother and older sister and four other Dutch Jews for 25 months in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.

Mrs. Gies gave Anne’s writings to Mr. Frank, and they were first published in the Netherlands in 1947 in an abridged version.

“I am not a hero,” Mrs. Gies wrote in her memoir, “Anne Frank Remembered,” published in 1987.

On one occasion, Miep and Jan Gies (he is referred to in the diary as Henk, one of many pseudonyms Anne used) spent a night in the annex to experience the terror there for themselves.

But when Anne’s father, Otto Frank, returned to Amsterdam at the end of World War II, having been liberated from Auschwitz, he was the lone survivor of the family.

Anne Frank had died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp three months before her 16th birthday.

BuzzPermalink By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: January 11, 2010
Miep Gies, the last survivor among Anne Frank’s protectors and the woman who preserved the diary that endures as a testament to the human spirit in the face of unfathomable evil, died Monday night, the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam said.

BuzzPermalink By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: January 11, 2010
Miep Gies, the last survivor among Anne Frank’s protectors and the woman who preserved the diary that endures as a testament to the human spirit in the face of unfathomable evil, died Monday night, the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam said.

But when Anne’s father, Otto Frank, returned to Amsterdam at the end of World War II, having been liberated from Auschwitz, he was the lone survivor of the family.

With them are those who helped hide the Franks: Johannes Kleiman, back left, Victor Kugler and Elizabeth Voskuijl.

But she came to be viewed as a courageous figure when her role in sheltering Anne Frank was revealed with the publication of her memoir.

BuzzPermalink By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: January 11, 2010
Miep Gies, the last survivor among Anne Frank’s protectors and the woman who preserved the diary that endures as a testament to the human spirit in the face of unfathomable evil, died Monday night, the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam said.

When the Gestapo raided the hiding place in the annex to Otto Frank’s business office on Aug. 4, 1944, and arrested its eight occupants, it left behind his daughter Anne’s diary and her writings on loose sheets of papers.

“Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” has since been translated into dozens of languages in several editions, read by millions and adapted for the stage and screen, a voice representing the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.

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Steve North/Associated Press
Miep Gies displayed a copy of her book “Anne Frank Remembered” at her apartment in Amsterdam in 1998.

But Mrs. Gies remained largely anonymous until an American writer, Alison Leslie Gold, persuaded her to tell her story and worked with her on “Anne Frank Remembered.”

Mrs. Gies later went to Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam in a futile attempt to offer a bribe for the lives of the eight arrested Jews.

My young friend had left a remarkable legacy to the world.

The journals recounted life in those rooms behind a movable bookcase and the hopes of a girl on the brink of womanhood.

When the Gestapo raided the hiding place in the annex to Otto Frank’s business office on Aug. 4, 1944, and arrested its eight occupants, it left behind his daughter Anne’s diary and her writings on loose sheets of papers.

When she was 13, the family moved to Amsterdam, and in 1933 she became a secretary to Otto Frank, who was overseeing the Dutch branch of a German company selling an ingredient for manufacturing jam.

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Steve North/Associated Press
Miep Gies displayed a copy of her book “Anne Frank Remembered” at her apartment in Amsterdam in 1998.

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Times Topics: Anne Frank | Holocaust and the Nazi Era
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Anne Frank House, via Associated Press
Miep Gies, front left, and Otto Frank, center, in a 1945 photograph.

The annex became a hiding place not only for the Franks but for three members of a family named van Pels — the father a business colleague of Mr. Frank’s — and Mrs. Gies’s dentist, Fritz Pfeffer.