Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family

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This is a docu-story about the day to day life of the Dutch people under Nazi rule from the mouth of the woman whose family brought the Frank's, and the Franks' friends in the hiding place, their daily food and supplies throughout the entire Nazi occupation. In collaboration with Alison Leslie Gold, Gies wrote the book Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family in 1987. I could and did tell details that their parents and grandparents had chosen not to discuss with them. Miep Gies - her original given name was Hermine - was born in Vienna in 1909, and sent to the Netherlands after World War I as part of a program for children suffering from malnutrition. A few days later, Gies walked into the Gestapo’s local headquarters and attempted to bribe Karl Silberbauer, the SS officer in charge, to free those he’d arrested.

I was not the strongest child, and because of the serious food shortages during the war, I had become undernourished and sick. Despite five children of his own, this man and his wife, although not well off by any means, took the attitude that where seven could eat, so could eight, and so they slowly revitalized their little hungry child from Vienna.

Born in Vienna, Austria, to Karoline Maria Santrouschitz, [10] [11] Gies was sent to Leiden from Vienna in December 1920 to escape the food shortages prevailing in Austria after World War I. By the beginning of 2002, more than 19,000 non-Jews had been recognized as Righteous (Among the Nations) by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. Miep Gies gives far more insight and information into the story of all who were hiding in the annexe. Everyone believed that the quickest way for a child to learn the Dutch language was to go to a Dutch school. They strapped a pair of wooden skates with curling blades to my shoes with leather thongs, and pushed me out onto the frozen surface.

Before the hiding place was emptied by the authorities, Gies and the younger secretary Bep Voskuijl retrieved parts of Anne Frank's diaries and saved them in their desk drawer. From her own remarkable childhood as a World War I refugee to the moment she places a small, red-orange, checkered diary -- Anne's legacy -- in Otto Frank's hands, Miep Gies remembers her days with simple honesty and shattering clarity.

Though Gies “lived quietly in Amsterdam [as] a homemaker” for much of her life, she entered the public eye following the publication of her memoir in 1987, traveling “widely as a living link to Anne Frank [who] spoke on the lessons of the Holocaust,” as the New York Times’ Richard Goldstein wrote in 2010. The woman took off all my layers of clothes, removed the bow from my hair, and put me between the covers in the center of the other bed.