NETHERLANDS – The last survivor of the small group of people who protected teenager Anne Frank and her family for two years from the Nazis turned 100 yesterday.
Miep Gies reached a century in age saying she had won more accolades for helping the Frank family 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.
It was Ms Gies who gathered up Anne’s scattered papers and notebooks after the family’s hiding place was raided in 1944.
She locked them – unread – in a desk drawer to await the teenager’s return.
Anne died of typhus in the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen seven months after her arrest. British and Canadian troops liberated the camp two weeks later.
Ms Gies gave the collection to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, the only survivor among the eight people who hid in the concealed attic of the canalside warehouse.
He published it in 1947, and it was published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl.
Retitled The Diary of Anne Frank, it was the first book about the Holocaust to win popular appeal, and has sold tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages.
As she looked forward to a quiet birthday with her son and three grandchildren, Ms Gies paid tribute to the “unnamed heroes” who helped Dutch Jews during the five years of Nazi occupation.
“I would like to name one, my husband January. He was a resistance man who said nothing but did a lot. During the war he refused to say anything about his work, only that he might not come back one night. People like him existed in thousands but were never heard,” she said.
January Gies died in 1993. – (AP)