Miep Gies, who helped Anne Frank hide from the Nazis and saved her diary, dies at 100

In this May 19, 2006 photo released by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Netherlands, 97 year old Miep Gies is seen. Anne Frank called them the Helpers. They provided food, books and good cheer while her family hid for two years from the Nazis in a tiny attic apartment. On Sunday, Feb. 15, 2009, the last surviving helper, Miep Gies, celebrates her 100th birthday, saying she has won more accolades for helping the Frank family than she deserved as if, she says, she tried to save all the Jews of occupied Holland. The Anne Frank Museum says Gies, who helped the teenage diarist's family hide from the Nazis, died Monday Jan. 11, 2010. She was 100. (AP Photo/Anne Frank House, File) 


Gies was the last of the few non-Jews who supplied food, books and good cheer to the secret annex behind the canal warehouse where Anne, her parents, sister and four other Jews hid for 25 months during World War II.

After the apartment was raided by the German police, Gies gathered up Anne's scattered notebooks and papers and locked them in a drawer for her return after the war. The diary, which Anne Frank was given on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life in hiding from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944.

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. Gies gave the diary to Anne's father Otto, the only survivor, who published it in 1947.

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

"This is very unfair. So many others have done the same or even far more dangerous work," she wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press days before her 100th birthday last February.

"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 some 65 languages.



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