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6 Shevat 5770 - January 21, 2010 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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NEWS
Dutch Woman Who Helped Hide Anne Frank Dies at 100

By R. Hoffner

Miep Gies, a Dutch woman who helped hide Anne Frank, her parents, her sister and four other Jews from the Nazis and later safeguarded Anne Frank's diary, passed away at the age of 100 following a short illness, according to the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam.

Gies, who was born in Austria and immigrated to Holland in 1920, worked as a secretary for Otto Frank, Anne's father, in his spice shop, and helped the family members hide in the back part of an Amsterdam office building for a period of two years, from July 1942 until August 1944. Together with four other workers and at great risk, she would deliver vital supplies and books to the hideout, until an informant notified the Nazis of its existence.

She also refused to join a Nazi Party support group for women, despite threats she would be deported back to Austria.

When the Frank family was arrested, Gies unsuccessfully tried to prevent their deportation by bribing an Austrian officer from her hometown of Vienna. Afterwards she found the pages of the diary Anne Frank had kept, stashing them away in a desk drawer in the hope she would eventually be able to return them to the girl. After the war she gave the diary to the only survivor from the family, Otto, who had it published in 1947.

Gies received a special medallion from the Yad Vashem Museum in 1995 in addition to a medallion from the German government, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of England and in 1997 by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

Gies also helped publicize the story of Anne Frank in order to combat Holocaust deniers. She traveled around the world to share her account of her personal acquaintance with Anne Frank, disputing allegations in recent years that the diary was forged. In an interview last year Gies said "others did much more than I to save Jews in Holland."

Anne Frank and her sister Margot died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany, just weeks before it was liberated by the Allied Forces. Their mother Edith perished at Auschwitz.

Anne Frank's diary is considered the most widely read Holocaust book in the world and has significantly helped raise awareness of the horrors Jews suffered during World War II. Written in the form of letters to an imaginary friend, the diary describes the isolation and the difficult experience of living in hiding. It has been translated to over 70 languages and has sold tens of millions of copies.

UNESCO included the diary among 193 documents of special importance in the Memory of the World Register.

 

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