Anne Frank’s last helper, Miep Gies (100) dies

Miep Gies, the woman who saved Anne Frank’s diary in the second world war, died last Monday shortly after falling ill at the age of 100, a website moderated by her son has reported.

Gies became part of legend on August 4, 1944, the day Anne Frank and most of her family were reported to the authorities in an act of betrayal and deported from their hideaway in an 17th century home on Amsterdam’s historic canals.

After the Franks were gone, Gies gathered some of their belongings, including a small red-chequered diary, and kept them hidden in a drawer for the remainder of the war. In June 1945 she handed the book over to Otto Frank, Anne’s father.

Gies, born Hermine Santruschitz, came to the Netherlands as an anaemic, malnourished 11-year-old from her native Vienna, hoping to recuperate while living with a Leiden foster family. Not only did Gies regain her health, she felt so at home in the Netherlands that her parents agreed to let her stay here.

She later moved to Amsterdam, where she applied for a job at Opecta, Otto Frank’s conserve business. Gies and her – then prospective – husband’s family were close to Otto.

When Frank’s oldest daughter was called on for forced labour in Germany in July of 1942, the Frank family decided to go into hiding. Otto knew Miep would come to his aid if need be. “Once or twice in a lifetime, people exchanges glances that cannot be described in words. We exchanged such a glance,” Gies said later.

After the war, still a friend to the Franks

On June 3, 1945, their eyes met again. “We faced each other silently until Otto Frank finally said, in a calm voice: ‘Miep, Edith won’t be coming back. But I have good hopes for Margot and Anne.’ ‘Yes, good hope,’” I parroted, trying to sound encouraging. “Why don’t you come in?’” Frank ended up staying with the Gies family for seven years, after which he moved to Switzerland.

Miep and her husband Jan shunned publicity until 1987, when she co-authored the book Anne Frank Remembered, with the American writer Allison Leslie Gold.

Gies said one of the reasons she finally wrote a book was that she was constantly overwhelmed by letters from inquisitive young students from far and wide who wanted to know more about the circumstances surrounding Anne Frank’s life. “Now I can reply that a book explaining all will soon be published,” Gies said in an interview in 1987.

In the same interview, Gies described how she and her husband experienced August 4, the anniversary of the deportation of the Frank family. “We pretend that day doesn’t exist,” she said. “We don’t look at the clock. I stand at the window all day. Jan deliberately turns his back to it. By the time we think five o’ clock has passed, and the day is over, we breathe more easily,” she said.