Miep Gies Obituary

I rarely think of Anne Frank's Diary simply because it is so affecting that these many years later it still brings a catch to my throat. As does this obituary of Miep Gies (from The Economist January 28th, 2010), the remarkable Dutch woman who sheltered Anne Frank and seven others at daily risk to her own life and the lives of those dear to her.

BY HER own account, Miep Gies did nothing extraordinary. All she did was bring food, and books, and news - and, on one fabulous day, red high-heeled shoes - to friends who needed them. It was nothing dramatic. But she also bought eight people time, and in that time one of her charges - a teenage girl called Anne Frank, the recipient of the shoes - wrote a diary of life in the "Annexe". In these four rooms, above the office of Anne's father, Otto, where Mrs Gies worked as a secretary, eight Jews hid for 25 months in Amsterdam in 1942-44.

That bringing of books always gets me. These poor isolated people connected to the world only by the shelterers and the written word.

What goes almost unsaid is that towards the end of the war, Holland was a country in full national starvation. Beyond the daily dangers of exposure, the simple act of finding food for eight in a country reduced to eating bulbs must have been a herculean task.

It is thanks to Mies Giep, not only that one member of the eight survived, but that Anne Frank's Dairy survived as well. She it was that collected the scattered pages after the Nazi's raided the hidden loft.
See also the Wikipedia article on this remarkable woman.