I recently saw my daughter perform as Mrs. Frank in the stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank, so when I saw that this memoir of the likeable and helpful Miep character was available to download, I jumped at it. In the play, it's obvious that the Franks and the others hiding out in the Annex couldn't have survived without Miep and others bringing them food and other supplies, but not until I heard her whole story did I realise just what risks this courageous young woman was taking every day.
I am grateful that Miep Gies started her story at the beginning: describing how she had come to the Netherlands from Vienna after WWI as part of a program to strengthen the health of sickly and starving children; how she quickly grew to love her adopted homeland and yearned for the day when she would be truly Dutch; how she met Otto Frank and then his family, growing to know and love them all; how she became politically aware in the years leading up to the German invasion of the Netherlands; and how this informed her senses of duty and justice.
Anne Frank Remembered choked me up several times, the first time being when Otto Frank confides in Miep that his older daughter had been instructed to report to a work camp and that he was going to take the entire family into hiding. When he asked Miep if she would help them, she immediately replied, "Of course." When he attempted to describe the dangers that she would be exposed to, she cut him off and reiterated, "Of course I will help." How many of us would immediately offer this help, knowing that the penalty for hiding Jews was deportation or death?
In the twenty-five months that the Franks et al were hiding in the secret rooms above her work place, Miep spent every day searching for the supplies necessary to keep them all alive. She visited those in hiding every morning to get their shopping lists and then, with forged ration cards (which her freedom fighting husband was able to obtain) and a quantity of money that would have gotten her arrested had she been searched by the ever present Green Police, she went from store to store, longer and longer trips as food became more scarce, never buying enough from any one store to raise suspicions. She would deliver their supplies and visit over lunch, never letting anyone know just how hard or dangerous conditions were becoming for her, return to her office job and then visit again at the end of the day when the workers had all left and those in hiding could move around a bit more freely. None of this is stated as a complaint in the book; Miep gladly did everything she could to help out her friends. It also choked me up in one scene where Miep, noticing that Anne was beginning to make the leap from child to young woman, brought her a pair of red high heels.
I think that everyone knows that eventually the attic was discovered and those in hiding were sent to concentration camps. There is a monologue at the end of the play where Mister Frank says that the last time he saw his daughter Anne alive, she was naked and starving and her head was shaved and they were separated from one another by a fence. Knowing how their story ended, the arrest scene from Miep's perspective was horrifying and terribly sad. But I had to marvel at the courage she showed when confronted by the arresting Nazi: as he screamed at her, she recognized that he had a Viennese accent. She told him that she was also from Vienna and that he should be ashamed of himself. This was probably the only thing that saved her from arrest like her fellow coworkers. She followed this up by going to the Nazi headquarters the next day to see if he would accept a bribe to release her friends, but they had already been moved on.
As this is Miep's story, it continues on with the conditions endured by the Dutch until the end of WWII, and then on to the reunification with Otto Frank, the details surrounding his decision to publish Anne's diary (which Miep herself had saved from the ransacked Annex), and her decision to publish her own memoir fifty years later. I recently enjoyed a similar memoir,The Secret Holocaust Diaries :The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister, by a Russian woman who was the lone survivor of Nazi atrocities in her own family. It is unfathomable to me that anyone could be a Holocaust denier and I am grateful that these and other memoirs were published before the stories could have been lost forever with the memories of their authors. With this book, Miep Geis went from a minor character in a stage play to a fully real and amazing woman whose courage and senses of duty and justice should be an inspiration to anyone who learns her story.
