(RNS) Miep Gies died at age 100 in Holland on Jan. 11, a living reminder that while 6 million innocent Jews died one by one, there were also brave souls like Gies who tried to save and protect them, one by one.

During World War II, Gies and four others in the Dutch resistance movement protected eight Jews, including teenager Anne Frank, who secretly hid in an Amsterdam attic for 25 months before her family was discovered and seized by the Nazis in August 1944.

Anne and her sister Margot died of typhus in March 1945 in the Bergen Belsen camp, just two months before the war ended; their mother Edith was killed at Auschwitz. Only Otto Frank, the family patriarch, survived the war; he died in 1980. Had she lived, Anne Frank today would be 80 years old.

Aiding Jews in any manner inside Nazi-occupied Europe was a crime punishable by death. Although Gies put her life at risk to save Jews, she was always modest about her courageous efforts.

“I am not a hero … I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did and more — much more — during those dark and terrible times years ago,” she later wrote.

After the Gestapo agents arrested “Miep’s Jews,” she discovered Anne’s abandoned diary in the attic. After the war, she gave the handwritten pages to Otto Frank.The young girl “left a remarkable legacy to the world. But always, every day of my life, I’ve wished that things had been different. … Not a day goes by that I do not grieve for them.”

Every Aug. 4, the date of the Gestapo arrests, Miep and Jan Gies remained alone inside their home, where they recalled that horrific event. Today, the building at Prinsengracht 263, Anne Frank’s hiding place, is a museum of remembrance.

Gies may have downplayed her heroism, but others didn’t. Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial honored her and her husband in 1972 on its list of “Righteous Among the Nations,” the courageous Gentiles who risked everything to protect endangered Jews.

Since it was first published in the original Dutch in 1947 and in English five years later, “The Diary of Anne Frank” has been translated into numerous languages and quickly became a classic. Broadway and Hollywood dramatized Anne’s story, and for millions of people, the diary remains their sole (and often their first) reference point to the Holocaust.

Anne’s diary has been called a work of universal optimism, especially because of these sentences: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

While Anne Frank may have believed people “are really good at heart,” she was keenly aware of the radical evil of the Nazi’s lethal anti-Semitism, which had forced her into hiding. Her diary entry from April 11, 1944 is a poignant quest for meaning, and ends with a profound theological conclusion:

“Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God who has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason only do we now suffer … We will always remain Jews.”

The mass murder of 6 million innocent people is an overwhelming statistic, but one teenage girl and her two years of hiding in the attic puts a terribly human face on such a dreadful statistic.

The Italian chemist and novelist Primo Levi, who survived the Holocaust, put it this way: “One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.”

Yet if it weren’t for righteous Gentiles like Gies, we might never have known her story.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)