The woman who saved Anne Frank's diary insisted she was no hero at all.
In short: Miep Gies was an ordinary office worker who risked execution to hide eight people from the Nazis for over two years. After their arrest, she recovered Anne Frank's diary, keeping it safe until the war ended. She spent the rest of her life rejecting the label of hero.
Born in Vienna in 1909, Hermine Santrouschitz was sent to the Netherlands as a child to recover from health issues and eventually became a secretary for Otto Frank’s spice business in 1933. When the Nazi occupation threatened the Frank family, Gies and her husband, Jan, became central figures in a secret network of helpers. From July 1942 until August 1944, they provided food and supplies to eight people hidden in an annex above the office, often navigating complex risks to avoid detection by authorities.
The operation ended abruptly on August 4, 1944, when the group was arrested. Gies narrowly avoided detention herself after a chance encounter with an interrogator from her own hometown of Vienna, who chose to let her go. Following the raid, she and her colleague Bep Voskuijl retrieved the scattered pages of Anne Frank’s diary from the floor. Gies kept the documents in a desk drawer, intending to return them to Anne, but eventually handed them to Otto Frank after learning of his daughter’s death in the Bergen-Belsen camp.
Gies never read the diary before giving it to Otto, later noting that had she done so, she would have destroyed it to protect the names of the helpers and their suppliers. She remained humble about her actions throughout her long life, receiving numerous honors, including being named Righteous Among the Nations in 1972 and receiving a German national merit award in 1994. She died in 2010 at age 100, maintaining that she simply did what any decent person would have done in her place.
The mystery of who betrayed the hiders remains unresolved, with Gies herself discounting the primary suspect, Willem van Maaren. Her legacy persists not only through the preservation of the diary but also through her own 1987 memoir, written with Alison Leslie Gold, which documented the harrowing reality of the resistance. Her life serves as a stark reminder of the quiet, dangerous choices made by individuals during the Holocaust.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Miep Gies
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