Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Rest in Peace Miep Gies

I remember watching the Oscars one year, when a film about Anne Frank won an award. The film-maker came onstage with an old lady beside him, and suddenly I sounded like the Roadrunner as I pointed to the screen crying "Miep, Miep!" In one of the obits below she is quoted regarding her decision to go to the Academy Awards having been based on the fact that Anne had loved Hollywood so much.

Miep lived to a ripe old age - 100 - yet it is still sad that she has gone. Now it's all just history, since the last witness is dead.

"Miep Gies devoted herself to sustaining Anne Frank's legacy, answering letters from all over the world. In 1987 she published a book, Anne Frank Remembered. In it she observed: "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, but always like yesterday in the heart of those of us who bear witness.""
The Telegraph

"When Otto Frank finally returned to Amsterdam in the summer of 1945, it was to find that Miep Gies had kept the business going despite nearly starving during the terrible final winter of the conflict. With nowhere to live, Otto Frank moved in with the Gies family and stayed with them for seven years until he moved to Switzerland to be close to his mother."
The Times

"After Otto Frank's death in 1980, she continued to campaign against Holocaust deniers and refute allegations that the diary was a forgery."
The Guardian

"A small woman — just a shade over 5 feet tall — whose hair had turned white, she bore a single remembrance of those days in the hiding place, a black onyx ring with a diamond in the center, worn on her left hand. It was a gift from Auguste von Pels, one of the doomed Jews she had sheltered."
NY Times

1 comment: