About the popular Diary of Anne Frank

Rescuer of Anne Frank's diary is 100

* Amsterdam
* February 14, 2009


ANNE Frank called them "the Helpers". They provided food, books and good cheer while she and her family hid for two years from the Nazis in a tiny attic apartment.

Tomorrow, the last surviving helper, Miep Gies, celebrates her 100th birthday, saying she has won more accolades for helping the Frank family than she deserved — as if, she says, she tried to save all the Jews of occupied Holland.

"This is very unfair. So many others have done the same or even far more dangerous work," she wrote in an email to the Associated Press this week.

It was Mrs Gies who gathered up Anne's scattered papers and notebooks after the hiding place was raided in 1944. She locked them — unread — in a desk drawer to await the teenager's return.

Anne died of typhus in the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen seven months after her arrest. British and Canadian troops liberated the camp two weeks later.

Mrs Gies gave the collection to Anne's father Otto, the only survivor of the eight people who hid in the concealed attic of the canal-side warehouse.

He published it in 1947, and it was released in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl. Retitled The Diary of Anne Frank, it was the first book about the Holocaust to win popular appeal, and has sold tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages.

As she looked forward to a quiet birthday with her son and three grandchildren, Mrs Gies paid tribute to the "unnamed heroes" who helped Dutch Jews escape the net during the five years of Nazi occupation.

"I would like to name one, my husband, Jan. He was a resistance man who said nothing but did a lot. During the war he refused to say anything about his work, only that he might not come back one night. People like him existed in thousands but were never heard," she said.

Jan Gies, who was not one of the four office workers who supplied the Frank family with their daily needs, died in 1993.

Such people fought a lonely battle in the Netherlands. Historians say collaborators were many and anti-Nazi resistance was light. Of the prewar Jewish population of 140,000, some 107,000 were arrested and deported. The Red Cross says only 5200 of them survived the war.

After the war, Mrs Gies worked for Otto Frank as he compiled and edited the diary.

After Mr Frank's death in 1980, Mrs Gies continued to campaign against Holocaust deniers and to counter allegations that the diary was a forgery.

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