Woman who saved Anne Frank's diary dead at 100: website
(Agencies)
2010-01-12 14:49
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Miep Gies, who helped hide and feed Anne Frank and her family for two years in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in the 1940s, is pictured in 2006, in a photo released by the Anne Frank House. It has been announced that Gies died on Monday after a brief illness, at the age of 100. |
THE HAGUE – The woman who saved Anne Frank's diary from the Nazis, Miep Gies, died Monday after a brief illness, her website announced. She was 100 years old.
Gies was the last surviving and best known of the group who helped Frank and her family hide from the Nazis during World War II. She collected and hid the teenager's diary after the Nazi secret police discovered their hiding place in an Amsterdam office building.
Anne Frank died from disease at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but her father Otto returned from Auschwitz and Gies gave him his daughter's diary.
The teenager's memoir, first published in 1947, became one of the most renowned accounts of Jews hiding from Nazi persecution and has been translated into 70 languages.
Born Hermine (Miep) Santruschitz in Vienna in 1909, she moved to the Netherlands at age 11, according to a biography published on her website: www.miepgies.nl.
In 1933, she began working for Otto Frank at his Opekta trading company.
At great risk to her own safety, she helped bring food to the Franks and another family who went into hiding in a secret annex of Opekta's office building from 1942 until their discovery and arrest in 1944.
"I'm not a hero," Gies was quoted as having said in a statement upon her 100th birthday.
"It wasn't something I planned in advance, I simply did what I could to help," said the statement published by the Anne Frank Museum.
Gies received numerous honours for her role, including from the Netherlands, Germany and Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre.