Eulogy for Miep Gies: ‘There is Nothing Special About Me’
Miep Gies, who found and safeguarded the diary of Anne Frank after her arrest by the Nazis in 1944, has died at the age of 100.
“I didn’t read Anne’s diary papers. … It’s a good thing I didn’t because if I had read them I would have had to burn them,” she said in the 1998 interview. “Some of the information in them was dangerous.”
The diary was sheltered in Gies’ desk drawer and later turned over to Otto Frank when he returned after the war as the only surviving resident of the annex. Anne died at northern Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
Her father published her diary, titled “The Secret Annex,” in 1947.
Despite the legendary hardship she endured during the German occupation, Gies never embraced the label of a hero.
“More than 20,000 Dutch people helped to hide Jews and others in need of hiding during those years. I willingly did what I could to help. My husband did as well. It was not enough,” she says in the prologue of her memoirs, “Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family.”
“There is nothing special about me. I have never wanted special attention. I was only willing to do what was asked of me and what seemed necessary at the time.”
Frank says: