Miep Gies never wanted to be called a hero. For decades, whenever interviewers praised the courage required to help Anne Frank, her family, and four other Jewish people hide from Nazi persecution in Amsterdam, Gies redirected attention away from herself. She had seen people in danger, she explained, and had done what she believed another human being should do. That modest explanation has become inseparable from her legacy, but it should not obscure the danger involved. For more than two years, Miep and the other helpers of the Secret Annex risked arrest while finding food, supplies, books, news, and practical support for eight people whose discovery could have had devastating consequences for everyone assisting them.
Born Hermine Santrouschitz on February 15, 1909, in Vienna, Austria, Gies experienced displacement long before World War II. Malnutrition after World War I led her family to send her to the Netherlands at eleven, intending the move to be temporary. Instead, she made the country her permanent home. She eventually became an employee of Otto Frank, married Jan Gies, and found herself drawn into one of the most famous stories of the Holocaust. After the hiding place at Prinsengracht 263 was raided on August 4, 1944, Miep and Bep Voskuijl gathered Anne Frank’s scattered notebooks and papers from the floor. Miep locked them away without reading them, hoping to return them to Anne. When it became clear after the war that Anne had died at Bergen-Belsen, Miep gave the papers to Otto Frank. Without that simple act of preservation, one of the twentieth century’s most widely read personal accounts might never have reached the world.
🌍 A Hungry Child Leaves Vienna
Miep was born into a Catholic working-class family in Vienna during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her childhood coincided with World War I and its aftermath, when shortages and economic hardship affected families throughout Austria. By 1920, food scarcity had left eleven-year-old Miep undernourished enough that her family accepted help from a program arranging temporary stays for Austrian children in the Netherlands.
In December 1920, she boarded a train and traveled north to a country whose language she did not speak. The Nieuwenburg family received her in Leiden, expecting to care for her while her health improved. The temporary arrangement gradually became something more permanent. Miep recovered physically, became integrated into the family, learned Dutch, and increasingly felt at home in the Netherlands. When the Nieuwenburgs moved to Amsterdam in 1924, she went with them, and her biological family ultimately agreed that remaining there offered her the better future.
That early experience of being taken in by strangers remained part of Gies’s biography long before anyone knew her name internationally. A vulnerable child had once depended upon people outside her own family to provide food, shelter, and safety. It would be simplistic to claim that this experience alone explains decisions she made more than twenty years later, but it adds an important dimension to the life of someone who would eventually provide those necessities to people hiding from persecution.
🏙️ Becoming Miep
Although her official first name was Hermine, her Dutch foster family began calling her Miep, and the name remained with her throughout her life. She grew up in Amsterdam, attended school, learned to navigate Dutch society, and by adulthood regarded the Netherlands as home.
At eighteen, Miep began working as a typist for an embroidery and textile company. She remained there for several years until the economic crisis of the early 1930s cost her the position. An upstairs neighbor then told her about a new opportunity with a German Jewish businessman who had recently established himself in Amsterdam.
That businessman was Otto Frank.
Frank had left Germany as Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party consolidated power and antisemitic persecution intensified. In Amsterdam he was building Opekta, a company selling pectin used in making jam. Miep interviewed with him in 1933 and was hired. She learned the products, handled correspondence and customer inquiries, and became a trusted member of the small office staff.
At the time, it was simply a job.
Neither Miep nor Otto could know how completely their lives would become connected.
💼 Working for Otto Frank
The Opekta office eventually included a group of employees whose names would become familiar through Anne Frank’s story: Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and others who worked alongside Otto Frank as he tried to support his family in exile.
Miep came to know Otto’s wife Edith and their daughters, Margot and Anne. The Franks were one of many Jewish families who had left Nazi Germany believing that the Netherlands might offer safety. For several years, ordinary life continued. The girls went to school, Otto built his business, and the family adjusted to their adopted city.
That security collapsed when Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. The occupation brought increasingly severe restrictions against Dutch Jews. Businesses, schools, public spaces, employment, and movement were gradually restricted as persecution escalated. By 1942, deportations had begun, and Otto Frank understood that remaining openly in Amsterdam was becoming impossible.
He began preparing a hiding place behind his company’s offices at Prinsengracht 263.
The plan could succeed only if people outside were willing to help.
❤️ Jan Gies
Miep had met Jan Augustus Gies years earlier through her first workplace, and their friendship developed into a romantic relationship. They married on July 16, 1941, during the second year of the German occupation. Jan worked for Amsterdam’s municipal social services and became involved in resistance activities that provided him with contacts useful in obtaining ration cards and other necessities.
Their marriage placed both of them inside the dangerous network supporting people in hiding. Jan helped secure ration coupons and visited the Secret Annex, while Miep became one of the helpers responsible for supplying the eight people hidden behind Otto Frank’s workplace. They also concealed another person in their own home beginning in 1943: student Kuno van der Horst, who had refused to sign a declaration of loyalty demanded under the occupation.
The Gies household therefore operated within a much larger world of clandestine assistance. There was no single organized activity called simply “helping Anne Frank.” Resistance and rescue depended on informal networks through which people acquired coupons, information, documents, food, hiding places, and trusted contacts.
Every additional connection created another risk.
🚪 Otto Frank Asks for Help
In the spring of 1942, Otto Frank privately told Miep about his plan to take his family into hiding and asked whether she would help them if the moment came. According to Gies’s later accounts, she agreed immediately.
That answer is easy to admire from a safe historical distance, but the practical consequences were enormous. Helping Jews evade Nazi persecution could lead to arrest and severe punishment. The helpers would need to maintain ordinary appearances at work, obtain scarce food without attracting suspicion, carry supplies into the building, provide news from outside, and guard a secret involving an increasing number of people.
The plan became urgent on July 5, 1942, when sixteen-year-old Margot Frank received a summons ordering her to report for what was described as labor in Germany. The family moved into hiding the next day.
Miep helped transport Margot to Prinsengracht 263 by bicycle. Otto, Edith, and Anne arrived separately on foot. Within days, Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their son Peter joined them. Dentist Fritz Pfeffer later became the eighth resident of the hidden rooms.
A new routine began behind the movable bookcase.
🏠 Life Around the Secret Annex
The people hiding in the Annex depended completely upon helpers outside. They could not simply go shopping, visit a doctor openly, walk through the streets, or obtain legal employment. Almost every ordinary necessity required someone else to take a risk.
The helpers divided responsibilities. Miep concentrated particularly on obtaining vegetables, meat, other food, and supplies, carrying purchases by bicycle and bringing them into the building. She also borrowed library books for the residents. Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and others contributed in different ways, while Jan’s resistance connections helped with ration coupons.
Food became increasingly difficult to obtain as wartime shortages worsened. Shopping for eight additional people required care because unusually large purchases could provoke questions. Miep therefore spread purchases among different suppliers and relied upon relationships with shopkeepers she believed she could trust.
The work required a strange combination of secrecy and normality. Employees downstairs had to behave as though nothing unusual existed above them. The helpers entered and left the building, worked, spoke with customers, and moved through occupied Amsterdam while knowing that eight lives depended partly upon their ability not to attract attention.
📚 Miep and Anne
Anne’s diary gives readers occasional glimpses of Miep not as the historical rescuer she later became but as part of everyday life in hiding. Anne noticed the enormous amount of work Miep performed, including her bicycle journeys for food and her weekly visits to the library.
The two were separated by twenty years in age, and Miep did not pretend to be one of Anne’s closest companions. Her role was practical, but practical assistance inevitably became personal. She brought news from outside, participated in celebrations, listened, answered questions, and became one of the few people connecting the Annex with ordinary life.
Miep knew that Anne wrote in a diary. On one occasion, she accidentally interrupted the girl while she was writing and encountered Anne’s irritation at having her privacy disturbed. Miep later remembered Anne telling her that she was writing about her as well.
Miep did not ask to read the diary.
That decision would later become enormously significant.
🥕 Food, Books and News From Outside
For people confined to the Annex, the helpers brought more than calories. They carried evidence that an outside world still existed. Books offered mental escape from the rooms. Newspapers and conversations brought news. Food preserved life, but human contact helped preserve a sense that life still contained more than hiding.
The psychological burden upon the helpers was different from that experienced by the people concealed upstairs, but it was real. Miep could leave the building, yet she could not forget who remained behind. She moved through streets where arrests, restrictions, shortages, and occupation had become part of daily reality while trying to act naturally enough that nobody would notice the extraordinary responsibility she carried.
Her later recollections frequently resisted attempts to portray her as fearless. Fear was present. What mattered was continuing despite it.
That distinction helps explain why Gies disliked the idea of heroism when it implied some kind of unusual person naturally immune to danger. She wanted people to understand that ordinary individuals still possess choices when others are threatened.
🚨 August 4, 1944
On the morning of August 4, 1944, the hiding place was raided. Dutch police officers led by SS officer Karl Josef Silberbauer entered Prinsengracht 263 and arrested the eight people who had been living in the Secret Annex. Helpers Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler were also taken into custody.
Miep and Bep Voskuijl were not arrested. After the raid, they entered the hidden rooms, which had been searched and disturbed. Anne’s notebooks and loose papers were scattered across the floor among belongings left behind.
Miep and Bep collected the writings.
Miep placed the papers in a drawer of her desk, intending to keep them safe until Anne returned.
She did not read them.
The fact that she left the papers unread is one of the most consequential details in the history of Anne Frank’s diary. Gies later explained that had she read the diary immediately, she might have destroyed it because Anne had written about people involved in hiding and resistance. While the occupation continued, such information could have placed others in danger.
Privacy inadvertently became preservation.
🏢 Trying to Rescue the Prisoners
After the arrests, Miep attempted something even more dangerous than safeguarding the diary. She went to the headquarters of the German security service and tried to persuade the authorities to release the prisoners.
She had recognized Silberbauer as Viennese and attempted to use their shared Austrian background as a way of reaching him. The effort failed, but she was allowed to leave.
The episode illustrates how quickly Miep could move from the cautious routines of clandestine aid into desperate improvisation. The system that had taken the people from the Annex was far beyond her ability to control, yet she could not simply accept their disappearance without trying something.
The eight people in hiding were deported. Otto Frank would eventually become the only one among them to survive the Holocaust. Anne and Margot Frank died at Bergen-Belsen in early 1945. Edith Frank died at Auschwitz. Hermann, Auguste, and Peter van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer also died as a result of Nazi persecution and imprisonment.
For those waiting in Amsterdam, information arrived slowly.
Hope did not disappear all at once.
🕊️ Liberation and Otto Frank’s Return
German forces in the Netherlands surrendered in May 1945. The occupation ended, but the uncertainty surrounding deported friends remained. Survivors began returning from concentration camps, and families searched desperately for news.
In early June, Otto Frank appeared at the home of Jan and Miep Gies after surviving Auschwitz and returning to Amsterdam. They invited him to stay with them, and he eventually remained in their household for more than seven years.
Otto began searching for his wife and daughters. Gradually the truth emerged. Edith had died at Auschwitz. In July 1945, confirmation reached him that Margot and Anne had both died at Bergen-Belsen.
Only then did Miep take the papers she had protected in her desk and give them to Otto.
She had preserved them for Anne.
Now they became Anne’s legacy.
📖 The Diary Reaches the World
Otto Frank read Anne’s writings and discovered dimensions of his daughter that even he had not fully known. Anne had revised portions of her diary with the hope that it might someday become a book. Otto eventually prepared a version for publication, and Het Achterhuis appeared in Dutch in 1947.
The diary gradually reached readers around the world through translations, stage adaptations, films, classrooms, museums, and scholarship. Its enormous reach transformed Anne Frank from one murdered Jewish teenager among millions of victims into one of the most recognizable individual voices associated with Holocaust memory.
Miep initially avoided reading the published book. Otto eventually persuaded her. The experience was painful because Anne’s observations returned the lost inhabitants of the Annex to daily life. Conversations, irritations, hopes, jokes, fears, and habits that had once seemed temporary were now permanent because the people themselves were gone.
The survival of the diary depended upon several people and decisions, but Miep’s act after the raid was indispensable. She saw scattered papers and understood that they belonged to someone who might return for them.
She picked them up.
🧾 The Importance of Not Knowing the Future
One reason Miep Gies’s story remains so compelling is that she did not know she was preserving a famous book.
When she gathered Anne’s writings from the floor, there was no Diary of a Young Girl. There was no internationally known Anne Frank House, no school curriculum built around Anne’s words, no films, no translations, and no worldwide correspondence arriving for Miep.
There was only a missing teenager’s diary.
This difference matters. Historical events often look inevitable after we know their outcome, but the people living through them do not possess that knowledge. Miep’s decision was therefore not an act of literary preservation made because she understood the future importance of the manuscript. It was an act of loyalty.
She kept Anne’s belongings because she hoped Anne would return.
The tragedy is that Anne did not.
The gift to history is that the papers did.
👶 Life After the War
Miep and Jan attempted to rebuild ordinary life after the occupation. Their son Paul was born in 1950, and the family remained close to Otto Frank for years. Yet the experience of the Annex never disappeared completely. Every August 4, Miep and Jan privately remembered the day their friends had been arrested.
As Anne’s diary became internationally famous, journalists, readers, students, and historians increasingly sought out the people who had known her. Miep found herself becoming a public witness to a period she had originally experienced as private responsibility.
Jan generally remained more comfortable outside the spotlight, while Miep gradually accepted a larger role in speaking about the Annex. After Otto Frank’s death in 1980, she became one of the most important remaining firsthand voices able to describe the hidden family’s daily life from the perspective of a helper.
That role lasted for decades.
The woman who had once needed secrecy now spent her old age explaining why secrecy had been necessary.
📘 Anne Frank Remembered
In 1987, Miep Gies published Anne Frank Remembered with writer Alison Leslie Gold. The memoir finally gave readers her own extended account of the years surrounding the Secret Annex.
The book begins long before Anne went into hiding because Gies understood that her actions did not emerge from nowhere. She wrote about Vienna, her foster family, Amsterdam, meeting Jan, working for Otto Frank, the occupation, daily life around the Annex, the arrest, the recovery of Anne’s writings, and the difficult aftermath of the war.
The memoir also pushes against the mythology surrounding its author. Miep repeatedly insisted that she was not uniquely brave and did not want admiration to become an excuse for other people to imagine that helping requires extraordinary character.
Her preferred lesson was more demanding.
Ordinary people can act.
That means ordinary people also bear responsibility for deciding what they do when they see others threatened.
🏅 Recognition and the Righteous Among the Nations
Miep and Jan Gies eventually received numerous honors for their wartime actions. In 1972, Yad Vashem recognized them as Righteous Among the Nations, the designation honoring non-Jews who risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. Other helpers connected with the Secret Annex were likewise recognized.
Miep later received honors from Germany and the Netherlands, including appointment as a Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau in 1995. Vienna, the city she had left as a malnourished child in 1920, honored her late in life as well.
She accepted recognition while continuing to resist the language of exceptional heroism. The distinction was important to her because calling rescuers uniquely heroic can unintentionally distance their choices from everyone else. If only extraordinary people are capable of helping, ordinary people can tell themselves that courage was never expected of them.
Gies’s own interpretation was different. She saw herself as an ordinary person who encountered an extraordinary moral situation.
That is precisely what makes her example difficult to dismiss.
🧠 The Question of Who Betrayed the Annex
The arrest of the people in the Secret Annex has generated decades of investigation and speculation about whether someone betrayed them and, if so, who was responsible. Various theories have been proposed, revised, disputed, and sometimes presented with more confidence than the surviving evidence supports.
Miep lived with the question but could not provide a definitive answer. Modern research likewise has not established a universally accepted identification of a betrayer. The uncertainty is important because the desire for a single culprit can distract from the larger historical reality: Jews in the occupied Netherlands were being systematically hunted, deported, and murdered through a vast machinery of persecution involving German authorities, collaborators, institutions, records, informants, police activity, and surveillance.
The story of the Annex does not require a solved betrayal mystery to explain its danger.
Eight Jewish people were hiding because remaining openly within occupied Amsterdam had become life-threatening.
The helpers were risking their safety because the system around them had made ordinary friendship illegal.
🕯️ Jan’s Death and Miep’s Later Years
Jan Gies died in 1993 at the age of eighty-seven. After more than fifty years of marriage and a lifetime shaped by shared wartime experiences, his death left Miep confronting another major loss.
She later moved closer to her son Paul and continued living independently well into extreme old age. The letters did not stop. Students, teachers, journalists, and readers from around the world continued asking about Anne, the Annex, and what it had been like to help.
Miep responded to many of them and continued participating in interviews and educational projects. She remained closely connected with the Anne Frank House and with efforts to ensure that Anne’s history was not separated from the broader history of Nazi persecution and the Holocaust.
Age gradually limited her public appearances, but not her concern with how the story was told.
She had become one of memory’s guardians.
🕯️ The Death of Miep Gies
Miep Gies died on January 11, 2010, shortly before what would have been her 101st birthday. She had suffered a fall late in 2009 and died in a care facility in the Netherlands. She was one hundred years old.
By then, everyone who had hidden in the Secret Annex and nearly all of the principal helpers were gone. Gies had become the last surviving and best-known member of the group that had supported Anne Frank and the others.
Her death generated international attention because the story she had carried belonged by then to millions of readers. Yet the woman being remembered remained strikingly consistent with the person described in earlier accounts: practical, modest, direct, and uncomfortable with attempts to place her above ordinary humanity.
Her life had stretched from imperial Vienna before World War I through the entire twentieth century and into the age of digital communication.
The diary she once stored quietly in a desk drawer had traveled unimaginably farther.
🌟 Why Miep Gies Still Matters
Miep Gies matters because her story asks one of history’s most uncomfortable questions: what can an ordinary person do when the society around her makes cruelty normal?
She had no army, political office, fortune, or special power. She worked in an office. She rode a bicycle. She shopped for vegetables. She borrowed library books. She carried messages. She protected papers. These actions sound almost painfully mundane when separated from their circumstances.
The circumstances changed everything.
Food became rescue because the people receiving it could not shop safely themselves. A library book became a thread connecting someone in hiding to the outside world. A bicycle journey became dangerous because the supplies being carried were intended for people whom the occupation authorities were seeking. Keeping papers became an act of preservation because the person who wrote them had been deported.
Gies’s story therefore refuses the comfortable assumption that history is shaped only by dramatic public acts.
Sometimes history survives because somebody sees papers on a floor and decides not to leave them there.
🎂 Remembering Miep Gies
Born on February 15, 1909, Miep Gies began life as Hermine Santrouschitz, a child in Vienna whose family could not provide enough food after World War I. At eleven, she was placed aboard a train and sent to strangers in the Netherlands so she could regain her health. The temporary refuge became home, and the child who had once depended upon another family’s willingness to care for her grew into an independent young woman in Amsterdam.
A lost job brought her to Otto Frank’s company in 1933. Friendship followed employment. German occupation transformed friendship into responsibility. When Otto asked whether she would help his family hide, Miep agreed. Jan agreed. Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and others joined the effort. For more than two years, they carried food, books, information, coupons, supplies, and reassurance into a hidden world behind a bookcase.
Then August 4, 1944, ended the routine.
The people disappeared into the machinery of deportation. The rooms were left behind in disorder. Anne’s diary lay among the scattered possessions. Miep and Bep gathered the papers, and Miep stored them without reading them because she hoped Anne would return.
That hope was not fulfilled.
Another one was.
The diary survived.
Miep lived another sixty-five years after liberation, long enough to see Anne’s private writing translated across languages and generations. She wrote her own memoir, spoke to students, accepted honors, answered questions, and repeatedly tried to redirect attention from herself toward the moral choice at the center of her story.
She did not believe courage belonged exclusively to heroes.
She believed people could help.
Her life remains powerful because she proved what that simple sentence can require.
“But even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, within their own small ways, turn on a small light in a dark room.”
-Miep Gies
🔗 Related Articles
- Abraham Sutzkever: Poetry, the Vilna Ghetto & the Survival of Yiddish
- Arnošt Lustig: Remembering the Czech-Jewish Writer and Holocaust Survivor on His 100th Birthday
- Tadeusz Borowski: From Auschwitz to Acclaimed Author
📚 Sources & Further Reading
- Anne Frank House — Miep Gies
- Anne Frank House — Miep Gies About Helping the People in Hiding
- Anne Frank House — Miep Gies Research Record
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — Anne Frank Biography
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — Righteous Among the Nations
- Anne Frank House — Yad Vashem Award
- Miep Gies — Official Website
