She did not tell anyone, not even her own foster parents, about the people in hiding whom she was assisting. Every day, she saw trucks loaded with Jews heading to the railway station, en route to Nazi concentration camps. In an interview, Gies said she was glad to help the families hide because she was extremely concerned after seeing what was happening to the Jews in Amsterdam. With her husband Jan and other Opekta employees ( Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman and Bep Voskuijl), Miep Gies helped hide Otto and Edith Frank their daughters Margot and Anne Hermann, Auguste and Peter van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer in several upstairs rooms in the company's office building on Amsterdam's Prinsengracht from 6 July 1942 to 4 August 1944. He had insisted that I should wear it." Gies's fluency in Dutch and German helped the Frank family assimilate into Dutch society, and she and her husband became regular guests at the Franks' home. Henk and I had barely scraped together enough money for one gold ring. (.) Because times were hard, we had only one ring, although the custom was for a couple to have two. The couple faced some difficulties, but they were married on 16 July 1941 so that she could obtain Dutch citizenship and thus evade deportation. After refusing to join a Nazi women's association, her passport was invalidated, and she was ordered to be deported back to Austria within 90 days (by then annexed by Germany, which classified her as a German citizen). Gies, Frank's employee, became a close friend of the family, as did her fiancé, Jan Gies. Otto Frank had just relocated from Germany and had been appointed managing director of Opekta's recently expanded Dutch operations. ![]() I loved to dance and belonged like many young Dutch girls, to a dance club." My social life at this time was very lively. Gies wrote, "But the office was not the only thing in my life. Gies was an honor student, and described herself as "reserved and very independent" after graduating high school, she worked as an accountant and then in 1933 as a secretary with the Dutch branch of the German spice firm Opekta (since 1941 known as Gies & Company after Jan Gies was appointed the nominal director due to the Nazi laws). In 1922, she moved with her foster family to Gaaspstraat 25 in Amsterdam. The Nieuwenburgs, a working-class family who already had five children of their own, took her as their foster daughter, and called her by the diminutive "Miep" by which she became known. She died in 2010 at age 100, a month before her 101st birthday.īorn in Vienna, Austria, to Karoline Maria Santrouschitz, Gies was transported to Leiden from Vienna in December 1920 to escape the food shortages prevailing in Austria after World War I. 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. ![]() Gies had stored Anne Frank's papers in the hopes of returning them to the girl, but gave them to Otto Frank, who compiled them into a diary first published in June 1947. Together with her colleague Bep Voskuijl, she retrieved Anne Frank's diary after the family was arrested, and kept the papers safe until Otto Frank returned from Auschwitz in June 1945 and learned of his younger daughter's death soon afterwards. She became a close, trusted friend of the Frank family and was a great support to them during the twenty-five months they spent in hiding. In 1933, Gies began working for Otto Frank, a Jewish businessman who had moved with his family from Germany to the Netherlands in the hope of sparing his family from Nazi persecution. Although she was initially only to stay for six months, this stay was extended to one year because of frail health, after which Gies chose to remain with them, living the rest of her life in the Netherlands. She was Austrian by birth, but in 1920, at the age of eleven, she was taken in as a foster child by a Dutch family in Leiden to whom she became very attached. Hermine " Miep" Gies ( Dutch pronunciation: née Santrouschitz 15 February 1909 – 11 January 2010) was one of the Dutch citizens who hid Anne Frank, her family ( Otto Frank, Margot Frank, Edith Frank) and four other Dutch Jews ( Fritz Pfeffer, Hermann van Pels, Auguste van Pels, Peter van Pels) from the Nazis in an annex above Otto Frank's business premises during World War II. Miep and her husband Jan Gies at the book presentation of Miep Gies: Herinneringen aan Anne Frank (the Dutch version of the book Anne Frank remembered : the story of the woman who helped to hide the Frank family, 1987) in Anne Frankhuis near the moveable bookcase covering the stair to the secret hiding place "Achterhuis", Anne Frankhuis, Amsterdam.
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