The Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam announced that Miep Gies, the last survivor among Anne Frank’s protectors, and the woman who preserved her diary, died at age l00 on January 11, 2010.

Millions of people around the world who have read “The Diary of Anne Frank” know of the courageous women and men who kept the Frank family and four other Jews hidden for two years and one month – until they were anonymously betrayed to Nazi authorities. It is fitting to pause and give tribute at this time to the protectors.

Reading the obituary of Miep Gies stirred sharp memories of our l967 visit to the hiding place at Prisengracht 263 – the “Achterhuis” – or back-house. We had walked along a narrow canal to reach the front door that would open into the warehouse and former offices of the spice and gelling company that Otto Frank had managed. The rear extension of the building, called the Secret Annex by Anne, was concealed from view by houses on all four sides of a quadrangle. We walked behind the tall wooden bookcase that had covered the entrance to the staircase and slowly climbed the steps. At the top were the rooms that totaled about 500 square feet. In her diary, Anne wrote, “The Annex is an ideal place to hide. It may be damp and lopsided, but there’s probably not a more comfortable hiding place in all Amsterdam. No, in all of

Holland.”

The protectors were: Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler and Elizabeth Voskuijl, devoted employees of Otto Frank, as well as Jan Gies, Miep’s husband. Anne wrote, “Now our Secret Annex has truly become secret....Mr. Kugler thought it would be better to have a bookcase built in front of the entrance to our hiding place. It swings out on its hinges and opens like a door.” Thus, Anne describes the beginning of their protection and care by their Christian friends who continued to work for the new management that had taken over running the business once the Frank family and their friends had disappeared into the annex.

Miep Gies, born into a Roman Catholic family in Vienna in l909, was sent at the age of eleven to Holland during the acute food shortages after World War I. She was adopted by the family who later moved to Amsterdam and she grew up with the Dutch nickname of Miep. In l933 she became a secretary to Otto Frank, the manager of the Dutch branch of a German company selling an ingredient for making jam. Frank had fled Hitler’s Germany and was joined by his wife Edith and two daughters, Margot and Anne. Mrs. Gies became a close friend of the Frank family and trusted employee. She and her husband were shocked by the German persecution of the Jews. The Netherlands fell to the Nazis in May l940 and by July 1942, thousands of Dutch Jews were being deported to concentration camps. Otto Frank asked Mrs. Gies if she would help them go into hiding above the offices and she agreed immediately.

Mrs. Gies was a key figure in securing false ration books to make food provisions possible. She also gave them emotional support, bringing Anne her first pair of high-heeled shoes and baking a holiday cake as a special treat. Anne wrote about the protectors,” They come upstairs every day and talk to the men about business and politics, to the women about food and wartime difficulties and to the children about books and newspapers. They put on their most cheerful expressions, bring flowers and gifts for birthdays and holidays and are always ready to do what they can.” Jan Gies, a Dutch social worker and a member of the Dutch resistance movement, also hid an anti-Nazi university student in their apartment. They all risked death every day if their activities had been revealed.

Life in the secret annex demanded being indoors and moving very cautiously during the day with the least possible noise. Most of the time was spent in studying and reading with tension ever present as they constantly lived in dread of being discovered. Workers were in the warehouse directly below with the pipes from the toilets running down through the warehouse. There had to be as little flushing as possible during most of the day. In the afternoon, the workers went home for a short break and this allowed the protectors to go up and sometimes bring lunch. Anne often looked from the attic window at the sky and the chestnut tree behind the secret annex. On May 13, 1944, she wrote, “Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It is covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year...”

Just three months later, on August 4, 1944, the Gestapo raided the annex and arrested the Frank family and the other four Jewish occupants. Anne’s diary and writings on loose sheets of paper were left behind. Miep Gies found them after the Gestapo left and hid them unread, hoping that Anne would be able to claim them someday. Anne and her sister Margot were sent to Bergen Belsen, where they worked at hard labor and grew weak and emaciated. When a typhus epidemic swept the camp, they both died, Anne three months before her l6th birthday and Margot at l9. Their mother, Edith, died of starvation. Otto Frank had been sent to Auschwitz where he survived the Holocaust. He returned to Amsterdam after the war and Miep Gies gave him Anne’s writings. They were first published in the Netherlands in l947 as “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.” Her story has since reached millions of people after being translated into dozens of languages and adapted for the stage and screen.

The protectors remained largely unknown until an American writer, Alison Gold, persuaded Miep Gies to tell their story and helped her write “Anne Frank Remembered,” published in l987. When the Gestapo raided the annex on August 4, Miep Gies was working in the building. She was spared from arrest because one of the Nazi agents was also of Austrian descent. She later went to Gestapo headquarters and tried in vain to offer a bribe for the lives of the eight Jews. She and Elizabeth Voskuijl were questioned and threatened but not detained. Johannes Kleiman was arrested and jailed for seven weeks. Victor Kugler was arrested and held in work camps until the end of the war.

Otto Frank lived with Miep and Jan Gies for a time after the war. She became well known when her memoir was published and traveled extensively speaking about Anne Frank and the Holocaust. She and her husband observed August 4 every year in their Amsterdam home, reflecting on the past. A small woman, just over five feet tall, she wrote in her book, “ I am not a hero. I stand at the end of a long, long, line of good Dutch people who did what I did and more - much more - during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always like yesterday in the heart of those of us who bear witness.”

Joyce S. Anderson is the author of “Courage in High Heels,” “Flaw in the Tapestry,” “If Winter Comes” and “The Mermaids Singing.” She can be reached at JSAWrite@aol.com.