TOP STORY: THE HOLOCAUST: A message of tolerance from the woman who sheltered Anne Frank

c. 1996 Religion News Service CLEVELAND (RNS)-To watch Miep Gies with children is to understand why Anne Frank loved her. Gies, who risked her life to hide the Frank family from the Nazis during World War II, told Cleveland-area junior high school students that for a long while she hated all Germans and Austrians because […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

CLEVELAND (RNS)-To watch Miep Gies with children is to understand why Anne Frank loved her.

Gies, who risked her life to hide the Frank family from the Nazis during World War II, told Cleveland-area junior high school students that for a long while she hated all Germans and Austrians because of the deaths of her friends in concentration camps.


But it was Anne’s father Otto, who had lost his wife and two daughters to the Nazi death camps, who taught her the need for tolerance.

“Otto Frank asked from me like I ask of you: Stop saying `the Jews,’ `the blacks,’ `the Asians,’ `the Arabs’,” Gies, 87, recently told the students. “Lumping people together is racism.”

The group of students from Cleveland and Beachwood, Ohio, were still as she continued in careful English punctuated by a Dutch accent.

Never, she said, judge a person by skin color or ethnic or cultural heritage. Never blame victims of oppression for their plight. And know this: It is always wrong to stand by and do nothing.

“Many people think that if people have a problem they must have made a serious mistake. I do not think people in trouble have done something wrong. Many people all over the world looked the other way when in Germany the lives of millions of Jews were destroyed. … We must act if injustice happens. We should never be just a bystander.”

Gies has traveled to dozens of countries-including Austria and Germany-and has visited the United States 15 times. At every stop, she insists on visiting at least one classroom of children who are about the same age-13-that Anne was when she went into hiding. Her trip to Cleveland was sponsored by the local chapter of The National Conference, a human relations organization that periodically produces programs focusing on racism and bigotry.

She is the beloved Miep in Anne Frank’s diary.

For 25 months during World War II, Miep Gies risked her life daily to hide from the Nazis the young girl’s family and four other Jews. An employee of Otto Frank’s jam and spice company, she visited the secret annex above the offices every day, bringing food, packages and news from the outside world.


Anne adored her, trusting her with some of her biggest secrets, and it was Gies who gave the maturing teen-ager her first pair of high heels and supplied her with notebooks after her plaid-covered diary was filled.

Millions of people came to know Anne Frank’s story because of Gies, who saved her diary after the girl and the others in hiding were arrested by the Nazis on Aug. 4, 1944. Only one of them-Otto Frank-survived the concentration camps. Anne and her sister, Margot, died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany. The camp was liberated by the British about a month later.

Anne lives on, however, in the words of her diary, which was first published in 1947 and has since been translated into 55 languages and read by an estimated 20 million people.

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“I held on to the diary because I imagined Anne returning one day and saying, `Oh, Miep, my diary!”’ says Gies, the last remaining survivor of the four individuals who hid the Franks.

“It was only after we knew she was not returning, the day we found out that she had died in Bergen-Belsen, that I handed the diary to her father. Can you imagine his feelings, having just learned that his daughters were dead and then holding in his hands his daughter’s diary? It was a very emotional moment.”

She did not read the diary before she gave it to Otto, and it took a great deal of urging on his part before she could finally bring herself to read the words of the curious, precocious child whom she had known since she was 4 years old.


“It brought my friends back to me,” she says. “I heard again their voices, their laughs and arguments. Although I weep a lot while reading it, I am basically very grateful to Anne. She gave one of the finest gifts life ever gave me.”

Gies approves of the recent publication of an unabridged version of Anne’s diary (“The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition,” Doubleday), which adds about 30 percent more text that Otto Frank had originally cut because of references to Anne’s emerging sexuality and her frequently difficult relationship with her mother, Edith.

“People are entitled to know all Anne once wrote,” says Gies. “At the same time I respect Otto’s decision to edit the diary. He wanted to protect the reputation of Anne’s mother. Anne wrote very unpleasantly about her. … Otto considered Anne’s opinion about Edith proof of the often common problem between teen-agers and their parents.”

As for the sections on Anne’s sexuality, Gies shrugs her shoulders and smiles. “Fifty years ago people would not easily print that.”

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Petite and compact, Miep Gies wore a dark suit, her snow white hair in soft billows around a face sporting large eyeglasses. On her left hand she wore a black onyx ring with a diamond in the center, a gift from Mrs. van Pels, one of the people in hiding with the Franks who is identified as Mrs. van Daam in Anne’s diary.

She gave Gies the ring shortly before her capture by the Germans, and Gies has worn it ever since.


Her life as a crusader came about only in the past decade. At age 77, Gies embarked on a new career after having spent most of her life as a homemaker-wife to her husband, Jan, and mother to their son, Paul, who was born after the war.

With the publication in 1987 of her book, “Anne Frank Remembered,” she became Miep Gies, official debunker of the Holocaust revisionists, that small but vocal group of people who claim the Holocaust never happened and denounce Anne Frank’s diary as a hoax.

“I was shocked to hear some people say that the Holocaust never took place,” says Gies. “I feel that I myself was a witness, and to those people I would say, `If the Holocaust did not take place, then please tell me where are Anne and Margot Frank, two healthy, strong young girls who would have been still with us today? Where are they? I last saw them on Aug. 4, 1944, and after that I only saw their names on a German list of passengers on a cattle train to Auschwitz.”

“Anne Frank Remembered” was not her idea, and she opposed it when first approached by an American free-lance journalist, Alison Leslie Gold, who ended up being her co-author.

Gies and her husband, who was part of the Dutch Resistance movement and has since died, were not easily persuaded. Gold says it was clear why they were reluctant to do the book.

“Otto Frank had always been the `daddy of Anne Frank.’ They had been in the background,” she notes in an interview from her home in California. “They saw what they had done as their duty as ordinary citizens, and they were worried about detracting from the thousands of other Dutch citizens who had helped Jews and were since forgotten.”


Gies was surprised by Gold’s interest. “I told her, `People always ask me the same six questions (about Anne Frank). They never asked me the seventh question until you came.”’

What was that seventh question? “`What about you?”’ she says, a slight smile on her face. “Until Alison, no one turned to me and said, `What about your life during the war? What was it like?”’

The book later was made into a critically acclaimed television movie, “The Attic,” starring Mary Steenburgen as Gies. For the record, Gies approved.

After decades of virtual anonymity, Gies is suddenly finding herself recognized everywhere she goes in America, and she is frequently besieged by those who have heard her speak or, increasingly, have seen her in the Oscar-nominated documentary, “Anne Frank Remembered,” which was previewed last year on the Disney Channel and is now in theaters around the country.

She is prominently featured in the film, and will attend the Academy Awards next week with Jon Blair, the writer/producer of the documentary. If he wins, she will go up on stage with Blair to receive the Oscar.

“I do not look forward to this,” she says frowning. “But Jon wants me there, and so I will go.”


MJP END SCHULTZ

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