Miep Gies
Hermine "Miep" Gies (Dutch: [mip ˈxis];[a] née Santrouschitz; 15 February 1909[1] – 11 January 2010) was one of the Dutch citizens who hid Anne Frank, her family (Otto Frank, Margot Frank, Edith Frank) and four other Dutch Jews (Fritz Pfeffer, Hermann van Pels, Auguste van Pels, Peter van Pels) from the Nazis in an annex above Otto Frank's business premises during World War II. She was Austrian by birth, but in 1920, at the age of eleven, she was taken in as a foster child by a Dutch family in Leiden to whom she became very attached. Although she was only supposed to stay for six months, this stay was extended to one year because of frail health, after which Gies chose to remain with them, living the rest of her life in the Netherlands.
Miep Gies
11 January 2010 (aged 100)
Hiding Dutch Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from the Nazis; keeping Anne's diary
1
She said: "Over two million Holand people had helped hid Jewish people in the Second World War, I am just doing what I can to help".
In 1933, Gies began working for Otto Frank, a Jewish businessman who had moved with his family from Germany to the Netherlands in the hope of sparing his family from Nazi persecution. She became a close, trusted friend of the Frank family and was a great support to them during the twenty-five months they spent in hiding. Together with her colleague Bep Voskuijl, she retrieved Anne Frank's diary after the family was arrested, and kept the papers safe until Otto Frank returned from Auschwitz in June 1945 and learned of his younger daughter's death soon afterwards. Gies had stored Anne Frank's papers in the hopes of returning them to the girl, but gave them to Otto Frank, who compiled them into a diary first published in June 1947.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]
In collaboration with Alison Leslie Gold, Gies wrote the book Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family in 1987.[9] She died in 2010 at age 100.
Early life[edit]
Born in Vienna, Austria, to Karoline Maria Santrouschitz,[10][11] Gies was sent to Leiden from Vienna in December 1920 to escape the food shortages prevailing in Austria after World War I. The Nieuwenburgs, a working-class family who already had five children of their own, took her as their foster daughter, and called her by the diminutive "Miep" by which she became known. In 1922, she moved with her foster family to Gaaspstraat 25[9][12] in Amsterdam. Gies was an honors student, and described herself as "reserved and very independent"; after graduating high school, she worked as an accountant and then in 1933 as a secretary with the Dutch branch of the German spice firm Opekta. Gies wrote, "But the office was not the only thing in my life. My social life at this time was very lively. I loved to dance and belonged like many young Dutch girls, to a dance club."[13]
Otto Frank had just relocated from Germany and had been appointed managing director of Opekta's recently expanded Dutch operations. Gies, Frank's employee, became a close friend of the family, as did her fiancé, Jan Gies. After refusing to join a Nazi women's association, her passport was invalidated, and she was ordered to be deported back to Austria within 90 days (by then annexed by Germany, which classified her as a German citizen). The couple faced some difficulties, but they were married on 16 July 1941 so that she could obtain Dutch citizenship and thus evade deportation. "Anne was impressed with my gold ring. She looked at it dreamily. (...) Because times were hard, we had only one ring, although the custom was for a couple to have two. Henk [In her book, Miep called Jan by the name of Henk, because Anne Frank had used that pseudonym in her diary] and I had barely scraped together enough money for one gold ring. He had insisted that I should wear it."[14] Gies's fluency in Dutch and German helped the Frank family assimilate into Dutch society, and she and her husband became regular guests at the Franks' home.