Her name was Miep Gies and she lived in Amsterdam. She was an office secretary and she not only defied the Nazis in occupied Holland during the war, but she saved a document that the world would be much poorer without.
She was the woman who helped hide Anne Frank and her family for 25 months and in a way, more importantly, she gathered up all of Anne's papers and documents and hid them in a locked drawer waiting for Anne to return from the Concentration Camps after the war.
This incredible woman, who always refused to accept accolades for what she did in the war, died yesterday at 100 years old following a neck injury caused by a fall at her home just before Christmas.
She was the last non Jew to help Anne, her sister and her parents as well as four others who were all hiding in a secret room behind the canal front warehouse. If you ever get the chance, go and visit that house. It is a very moving and emotional experience.
After the home was raided by the Nazis and Frank and her family were taken to the death camps, Gies locked up Anne's papers and most importantly, never read them because she believed the teenager was entitled to her privacy. To understand the significance of that, you have to know that if she HAD read the diary, she would have destroyed it because all the helpers were identified.
Anne Frank's diary was given to her for her 13th birthday and details her life between June 12, 1942 and August 1, 1944. Frank died in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, just 14 days before that camp was liberated.
Gies gave the documents to the only survivor of the Frank family, Anne's father Otto, who published the Diary of Anne Frank in 1947. If you've never read it, then you have no understanding of the history of that period. Go and correct that TODAY.
Gies was honored by so many, including Israel's Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem, as well as the German Government and the Dutch Monarchy. But she always pushed away the praise, saying that she merely carried out her human duty.
"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 world lost one of its best yesterday. We can be comforted in the knowledge that Anne will be able to personally thank her for all she did now.
Picture from AP is a link from FoxNews.com
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