Miep Gies, who ensured the diary of Anne Frank did not fall into the hands of Nazis after the teen's arrest, has died. She was 100.
Gies was among a team of Dutch citizens who hid the Frank family of four and four others in a secret annex in Amsterdam, Netherlands, during World War II, according to her official Web site, which announced her death Monday. She worked as a secretary for Anne Frank's father, Otto, in the front side of the same Prinsengracht building.
The family stayed in the secret room from July 1942 until August 4, 1944, when they were arrested by Gestapo and Dutch police after being betrayed by an informant. Two of Gies' team were arrested that day, but she and her friend, Bep Voskuijl, were left behind -- and found 14-year-old Anne's papers.
"And there Bep and I saw Anne's diary papers lying on the floor. I said, 'Pick them up!' Bep stood there staring, frozen. I said, 'Pick them up! Pick them up!' We were afraid, but we did out best to collect all the papers," Gies said in a 1998 interview with The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
"Then we went downstairs. And there we stood, Bep and I. I asked, 'What now, Bep?' She answered, 'You're the oldest. You hold on to them. So I did."
"I didn't read Anne's diary papers. ... It's a good thing I didn't because if I had read them I would have had to burn them," she said in the 1998 interview. "Some of the information in them was dangerous."
The diary was sheltered in Gies' desk drawer and later turned over to Otto Frank when he returned after the war as the only surviving resident of the annex. Anne died at northern Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
Despite the legendary hardship she endured during the German occupation, Gies never embraced the label of a hero.
"More than 20,000 Dutch people helped to hide Jews and others in need of hiding during those years. I willingly did what I could to help. My husband did as well. It was not enough," she says in the prologue of her memoirs, "Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family."
"There is nothing special about me. I have never wanted special attention. I was only willing to do what was asked of me and what seemed necessary at the time."
Gies' husband, Jan, whom she married in 1941, died in 1993. The couple had a son together.
Miep Gies, is a hero despite how she wanted to be remembered. This is one of the most inspiring women you will ever encounter. This story is the epitome of heroism and goodness during a time when the world was being blanketed with a miasma of evil and genocide. Miep Gies' human spirit shines as a beacon for the others lost or trapped in hopelessness and tragedy. It's a shame that this amazing woman's life wasn't celebrated by the news media. Instead, I got an update on Tiger's penis spelunking and Harry Reid's incendiary comments regarding our President and his degree of melanin concentration. That's the problem with our world. Selfishness has created a portal to a world swept clean of any moral compass. To think a family or a group of familes, risking certain death, would conspire to hide Jewish families in their own homes during the Holocaust is beyond comprehension. A thousand lifetimes of courage and morality died with Miep Gies. She will forever be known as a hero.
