Miep Gies

AP

BY HER own account, Miep Gies did nothing extraordinary. All she did was bring food, and books, and news—and, on one fabulous day, red high-heeled shoes—to friends who needed them. It was nothing dramatic. But she also bought eight people time, and in that time one of her charges—a teenage girl called Anne Frank, the recipient of the shoes—wrote a diary of life in the “Annexe”. In these four rooms, above the office of Anne's father, Otto, where Mrs Gies worked as a secretary, eight Jews hid for 25 months in Amsterdam in 1942-44.

On the warm summer evening when the Franks went into hiding, Mrs Gies took charge. In subsequent months she and her trusty bicycle often carried so many bags of vegetables, bought with forged coupons, that she looked like a pack mule. No one suspected.

Every weekday morning she would climb two flights of stairs to the Annexe and get the grocery list. Every afternoon she would deliver the shopping and stay a while to chat—after composing herself and putting on a cheerful expression. In the cramped, stuffy rooms, made dim with lace curtains tacked across the windows, everyone had to whisper. She kept back the worst news: truckloads of other Jews sent to the camps, shot and gassed, and old friends killed. On their side, the four Franks, three van Pels and a dentist called Dr Pfeffer tried to conceal their tensions from her. Nonetheless, she could often feel “the sparks of unfinished conflicts left sizzling in the air”.

Anne, restless, curious and outspoken, was often the cause of these tensions. But Miep (as they all called her), was something of a soulmate: a teasing office girl who craved sweets, relished independence, loved to dance, drank ten schnapps at an engagement party—and, as a teenager, had also filled up notebooks with her private thoughts. Anne grilled her about her clothes and her hair and, on the one night Miep stayed in the Annexe, insisted that she slept in her bed. Miep found it small and hard and too heavy with blankets. But it was the fear in the place, “so thick I could feel it pressing down on me”, that kept her awake.

She was always the first into work, brewing up good, strong coffee to keep everyone else going, and when it came to the Annexe—though her husband Jan and other colleagues helped too—she was naturally the heart of the operation. It was she who let Mrs Frank pour out to her the despair she would not show otherwise. It was she who delivered library books on Saturdays, arranged presents on birthdays, organised a jam-making session when a huge crate of strawberries arrived, and made a new year cake with “Peace in 1944!” in hopeful icing on the top of it. She was always an optimist, sometimes too much so.

She also gathered up the scattered pages of Anne's diary on August 4th 1944, when the eight were arrested. Simply from the sound of their shoes on the stairs, she knew her friends were coming down “like beaten dogs”. Much of the diary had been written in blank account books smuggled from her office. She stowed it in a drawer, unread. After the war, and Anne's death in Bergen-Belsen, she gave it to Otto Frank.

In Leiden station

Mrs Gies felt so strongly for the Franks because she was a refugee herself. She had been born Hermine Santrouschitz in Vienna in 1909. Eleven years later, her legs like sticks, her parents sent her away from starving Austria to be taken in by a Dutch family. She sat waiting in Leiden railway station until a strong-looking man inspected the name-card hung around her neck, said a decided “Ja”, and took her away to join his family for a few months to fatten up. She remembered all her life that first drink of frothy milk, the warmth of her bed and the way that, on her first day at school, “so many hands reached out to guide me”. Eventually her birth-mother agreed that she should stay there. By 1938 she was “Dutch through and through”.

Her life crossed Otto Frank's when she joined his pectin firm in 1933. Her jam-making commended her. All his staff were devoted to Frank, but it was Mrs Gies to whom he turned in 1941 with the question: “Are you willing to take on the responsibility of taking care of us when we are in hiding?” Her response: “Of course.”

She wished she could do more. She helped other Jews, taking in the children and the cats of neighbours who were rounded up. But sometimes, seeing them marched past her window with their “bits and pieces of things”, she found the sight too awful and had to turn away. It was impossible to help them. Even scrounging food for the eight she had sheltered had become harder and harder. Yet their chances would have been better with her than in the camps. As it was, only Otto survived the war. Afterwards, she took him in again.

Her post-war life was devoted to housewifery, motherhood, and preserving the memory of Anne and her family for future generations. She was the last survivor of the society of the Annexe. For months she had resisted reading the published diary, but her heart was eased when she did. Every August 4th she would draw the curtains, unplug the phone and mourn her lost friends. But at least, as she often said, “I honestly believe we could not have done anything more to help the Franks.”