Before I fell asleep last night, I read further into Francine Prose's new book, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife--one of my favorite Christmas gifts, given by my grandmother who seems finely attuned to my interests (last year's book: The Gulag Archipelago). Besides feeling grateful for Prose's respect for Anne Frank as a conscious, intentional, and astonishingly gifted writer (the diary was carefully revised, not accidental), I've been reminded of the ten thousand acts of courage required to keep eight people hidden in Amsterdam from the Nazis.
Foremost among them: Miep Gies--the employee of Otto Frank who not only led the small coalition that cared for their family (and the Van Pels family, and Fritz Pfeffer) hidden in the infamous annex for more than two years, but who also took it upon herself to care for other people in need as well. She helped her landlady and other family members go into hiding, for example, and she and her husband hid a young Dutch student in their home after he refused to take an oath to not take action against the Germans.
Such nerve, intelligence, and heart leaves me startled with awe. I feel it again now, as I read of Miep Gies' death at the age of 100. Miep is the last to survive the small group that hid the eight people in the annex.
Miep Gies was born as Hermine Santrouschitz to a Christian family in Austria that left for Holland to escape the food shortages of their native country. She was ultimately adopted by a family in Holland and given a Dutch name; she always considered herself Dutch. In Amsterdam, Miep was hired by Otto Frank to work in his company, Opekta, ultimately becoming Frank's assistant and office manager ... and good friend. She socialized with them frequently. Fritz Pfeffer, the dentist she helped hide in the annex, became her dentist, even after Christians were forbidden to see Jewish health professionals.
Prose's book tells about how in 1938, Miep had her Austrian passport seized when she tried to renew it, and then was given the ultimatum of joining the Nazi party which, it goes without saying, Miep refused. Ultimately, her passport was revoked and she was told she would have to return to Vienna, join the Nazi Party, or marry a Dutchman.
Fortunately, Miep and Jan Gies already had plans to marry. So they did. The Franks were in attendance. So began a rather unusually eventful partnership.
From The Telegraph:
For two years Miep Gies and her husband Jan, a municipal employee whom she had married in 1941, risked their lives to smuggle in food and provisions and news from outside, begging, buying and bartering what they needed from farmers and shopkeepers. They were helped throughout by her colleagues Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman and Bep Voskuijl.
Miep acted as a confidante for the adolescent Anne, bringing her paper for her diary and, on one occasion, a pair of second-hand high-heeled shoes. The Gies's heroic feat of humanitarianism ended on August 4 1944, when the Frank family were betrayed (by a person whose identity remains unknown), arrested and sent to concentration camps.
When the Gestapo arrived, Miep Gies was at her desk in the office below. She recognised from the voice of one of the arresting officers that he was Viennese, and she managed to charm him, perhaps saving her own life.
She never saw her Jewish friends again but "could tell from the sound of their feet on the wooden steps that they were coming down like beaten dogs".
Later, at considerable personal risk, she went to Gestapo headquarters to try to bargain for their release – but to no avail. Eventually she returned to their hiding place and found Anne's diary, its pages scattered over the floor.
She intended to return it to its author, knowing how important the diary had been to her, and locked it away without reading a word. Nearly a year later, Anne's father Otto returned from Auschwitz. He knew his wife and friends had not survived, but still hoped that his two daughters, Margot, 18, and Anne, 15, had been spared.
Two months later he received a letter that confirmed that both girls had died in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, less than a month before the camp was liberated by British soldiers.
Here's what Francine Prose has to say about Gies' attempt to bribe the return of the eight people arrested from the annex, and her salvaging of the diary that would become, after the Bible, the bestselling book of nonfiction in the world, translated into more than seventy languages:
Of course, Miep was not merely guarding Anne's privacy (by storing, unread, the pages of the diary in her desk drawer), but protecting herself and her coworkers. Later, she would say that if she had read the diaries, she might have felt compelled to burn them, out of concern for her colleagues. It would have been safer for her to destroy the diary, just as it would have been safer not to go hide eight Jews, and certainly safer for her not to go police headquarters ... on the Monday after the arrest. Even by the standards of the previous two years, Miep's attempt to bribe Silberbauer into freeing the prisoners was extraordinarily brave, an almost recklessly dangerous act that demonstrated the strength of her attachment...
After the war, Otto Frank, the sole survivor of the original eight, returned to Amsterdam and lived with the Gies family until he remarried in 1952. He and Miep worked together to compile Anne's diary (see her speak about giving the diary to Otto in this Dutch interview; see Otto talk about reading the diary in this rare English television interview).
Otto died in 1980. In 1987, Gies wrote Anne Frank Remembered. Five years later, Jan Gies died. Their son and three grandchildren survive them. Til the end, Miep continued to receive what her son called "a sizable amount of mail" which she handled with the help of a family friend.
From Sky News:
"This is very unfair. So many others have done the same or even far more dangerous work," (Miep Gies) wrote just before her 100th birthday last February.
And as she put it in a 1997 online chat with schoolchildren:
"I don't want to be considered a hero ...
"Imagine young people would grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty. I am afraid nobody would ever help other people, because who is a hero? I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary."
Image Credits: The Guardian
Oh my gosh, this is so sad. She really is a hero. I'm glad to know that people like this walk on this earth, whether or not we know their names.
Posted by: freeverse21 | January 12, 2010 at 11:32 AM
She really a Hero , who did't care of her own life but work for human values which nowadys vanishing because of selfishness we should give honour to people like her so that humanity could survive
Posted by: RAJESH SINGH SOLANKI | January 25, 2010 at 06:12 AM