Miep Gies; Woman who helped hide Anne Frank

Mrs Gies refused to read the papers, saying even a teenager’s privacy was sacred. Later, she said if she had read them she would have had to burn them because they incriminated the “helpers”.

Anne Frank died of typhus at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, just two weeks before the camp was liber­ated. Mrs Gies gave the diary to Anne’s father, Otto, the only survivor, who published it in 1947.

After the diary was published, Mrs Gies tirelessly promoted causes of tolerance. She brushed aside the accolades for helping to hide the Frank family as more than she deserved – as if, she said, she had tried to save all the Jews of occupied Holland.

The Diary of Anne Frank was the first popular book about the Holocaust, and has been read by millions of children and adults around the world in 70 languages.

For her courage, Mrs Gies was bestowed with the Righteous Gentile title by the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem. Nevertheless, she resisted being made a character study of heroism for the young.

Born Hermine Santrouschitz in Vienna, she moved to Amsterdam when she was 11 to escape food shortages in Austria. She lived with a host family who gave her the nickname Miep.

In 1933, she took a job as an office assistant in the spice business of Otto Frank. After refusing to join a Nazi organisation in 1941, she avoided deportation to Austria by marrying her Dutch boyfriend, Jan Gies.

As the Nazis ramped up their arrests and deportations of Dutch Jews, Otto Frank asked Mrs Gies in July 1942 to help hide his family in the annex above the company’s canal-side warehouse on Prinsengracht 263 and to bring them food and supplies.

Jan and Miep Gies worked with four other employees in the firm to sustain the Franks and four other Jews sharing the annex. Jan secured extra food ration cards from the underground resistance. Mrs Gies cycled around the city, alternating grocers to ward off suspicions from this highly dangerous activity.

Touched by Anne’s precocious intelligence and loneliness, Mrs Gies also brought Anne books and newspapers while remembering everybody’s birthdays and special days with gifts. In her own book, Mrs Gies recalled being in the office when the German police, acting on a tip that historians have failed to trace, raided the hideout in August 1944.

A policeman opened the door to the main office and pointed a revolver at the three employees, telling them to sit quietly. After the arrests, she went to the police station to offer a bribe for the Franks’ release, but it was too late. On August 8, they were sent to Westerbork, a concentration camp in eastern Holland from where they were later packed into cattle cars and deported to Auschwitz. A few months later, Anne and her sister Margot were transported to Bergen-Belsen.

Two of the helpers, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman, were sent to labour camps, but survived the war.

Around 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands before the 1940-45 Nazi occupation. Of those, 107,000 were deported to Germany and only 5200 survived. Some 24,000 Jews went into hiding, of which 8000 were hunted down or turned in.

After the war, Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam and lived with the Gies family until he remarried in 1952. Mrs Gies worked for him as he compiled the diary, then devoted herself to talking about the diary and answering piles of letters with questions from around the world. After Otto Frank’s death in 1980, Mrs Gies continued to campaign against Holocaust-deniers and to refute allegations that the diary was a forgery.

She suffered a stroke in 1997 which slightly affected her speech, but she remained generally in good health and mentally alert.

Her husband died in 1993. She is survived by her son and three grandchildren.

Woman who helped hide Anne Frank;

Born February 15, 1909;

Died January 11, 2010.