Idle Gies

Miep Gies, the Helen Roper of the Holocaust, has died at the age of 100 after a fall. Gies, the former secretary of Otto Frank hid the Frank family from the Nazis in Amsterdam in the unused apartments and attic upstairs, and later found and saved Anne’s diary, thus ruining countless summer vacations as schoolchildren around the world read the book and fell in love with the doomed little girl. Gies, her husband and three others hid Anne, her father, mother and older sister and four other Dutch Jews for 25 months in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam before the Gestapo found their hiding place Aug. 4, 1944 and sent them to Auschwitz. Gies held onto the girl’s writings, never reading them, until the conclusion of World War II and gave them to her father, the lone survivor of the family, who published them in the Netherlands in 1947. Gies’ role was largely untold until she was persuaded to tell her story in the memoir “Anne Frank Remembered,” after which she traveled widely as a living link to Frank and a champion of tolerance. She later received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Yad Vashem medal, and was knighted by Queen Beatrix.