Miep Gies

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Hermine "Miep" Santrouschitz-Gies (born February 15, 1909, Vienna, Austria) is one of the Dutch citizens who hid Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis during World War II and preserved Anne's diary to be published later.

She was evacuated to Leiden in the Netherlands from Vienna in December 1920 to escape the food shortages caused by the end of World War I, and moved with her foster family to Amsterdam in 1922. There she met Otto Frank when she applied for the post of temporary secretary in his spice company, Opekta, in 1933. She initially ran the Complaints and Information desk in Opekta, and was eventually promoted to a more general administrative role. She became a close friend of his family as did Jan Gies, whom she married on July 16, 1941 after she refused to join a Nazi women's association and was threatened with deportation back to Austria. Her knowledge of Dutch and German helped assimilate the Frank family into life in the Netherlands and Miep and Jan became regular guests at the Franks' home.

With her husband, and her colleagues Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman and Bep Voskuijl, Miep Gies helped hide Edith and Otto Frank, their daughters Margot and Anne, Hermann and Auguste van Pels, their son Peter and Fritz Pfeffer in the sealed-off back rooms of the company's office building on Amsterdam's Prinsengracht from July 1942 until August 4, 1944. In theory, Miep and the other helpers could have been summarily shot if caught hiding Jews; that was a constant and very real threat. In practice, however, those caught hiding Jews were more commonly sentenced to 4-6 months at hard labor. On the morning of August 4th, 1944, an anonymous informant tipped off the Gestapo, and those in hiding, as well as Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman, were arrested. Three separate criminal investigations after the war all failed to pinpoint exactly who the informant was.

After the raid on the hiding place (she was not held by the Gestapo) Miep found the discarded diaries of Anne Frank and saved them for Anne's return. Once the war was over and it was confirmed that Anne had perished in Bergen-Belsen, Gies handed the collection of papers and notebooks that made up the diary to the sole survivor of the family, Otto Frank, who arranged for the book's publication in 1947. Miep did not read the diaries herself before turning them over to Otto Frank, and later remarked that if she had, she would have had to destroy them because of the amount of incriminating information in them. She was, however, persuaded by Otto Frank to read Anne's diary after the second printing of the book.

Once the book was published and widely translated, Miep and Jan became almost celebrity figures in the Netherlands and their courage was recognised with awards from several international organisations, including the Raoul Wallenberg Award for Bravery and the Righteous Among the Nations award. In 1994 Miep received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, in 1995 the Yad Vashem medal, and in 1997 she was knighted by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

Her only child, Paul, was born on July 13, 1950.

Miep Gies still lives in the Dutch province of Noord-Holland.

[edit] See also

• People associated with Anne Frank
• The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank - TV film based on Miep Gies book.
• Miep Gies Website

[edit] Further reading

• The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition, Anne Frank, edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold Van der Stroom, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, compiled by H. J. J. Hardy, second edition, Doubleday 2003.
• Anne Frank Remembered, Miep Gies with Alison Leslie Gold, Simon and Schuster 1988.
• Roses from the Earth: the Biography of Anne Frank, Carol Ann Lee, Penguin 1999.
• Anne Frank: the Biography, Melissa Muller, afterword by Miep Gies, Bloomsbury 1999.
• The Footsteps of Anne Frank, Ernst Schnabel, Pan 1988.
• The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, Carol Ann Lee, Penguin 2002.