The heroic woman who braved the wrath of the Nazis to feed, clothe and hide Anne Frank and her family for two years during the Holocaust has died at the age of 100. Miep Gies in London with Israel National Radio's Walter Bingham (Israel news photo: courtesy of WB) An office secretary in the German-occupied Netherlands during World War II, Miep Gies also saved the young teenager’s notebooks and papers, locking them in a drawer to hold them safe until her hoped-for return after the war. According to Gies’ web site, the elderly woman passed away after a brief illness - a report that was confirmed by the Anne Frank Museum. The BBC added that she died in a nursing home after having fallen last month. Gies was named a “Righteous Gentile” by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum, and has also been honored by the Dutch monarchy, the government of Germany and numerous educational institutions. Precious few Gentiles helped Anne’s desperate family – her parents, sister and four other Jews -- who were fleeing the Nazis. Gies was the last of those who supplied human compassion and physical sustenance to the refugees before the Gestapo discovered the location of the secret annex behind the canal warehouse in which they hid. An office assistant in the spice business belonging to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, Gies refused to join a Nazi organization in 1941. To avoid deportation to Austria, she married her Dutch boyfriend, Jan Gies. When the Nazis began arresting Dutch Jews, Otto Frank asked Gies to help hide his family in the annex above the company’s warehouse along the canal on Prinsengracht 263, and to bring them supplies. She agreed, and together with her husband and four other company workers, sustained the family until the Nazis captured them. Anne Frank’s diary describes in detail the 25 months of her life in hiding from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944. The young teenager, who received her diary as a gift for her 13th birthday, later died in captivity at the Bergen-Belsen death camp, in March 1945 – just two weeks before the camp was liberated by the Allied Forces. Gies, who refused to read the young girl’s papers out of respect for her privacy – which she said was “sacred” – gave the diary to Anne’s father Otto, the family’s sole survivor of the war. He later published the diary as a book in 1947, titled simply, “The Diary of Anne Frank.” It has since been published in at least 65 different languages and is required reading for students around the world as a way to understand the Jewish experience of the war. Gies resumed working for Otto Frank as he edited the diary, and then devoted the rest of her life responding to mail about the war and refuting the claims of Holocaust deniers. Otto Frank died in 1980, and Gies’s husband Jan died in 1993.
