Miep Gies Biography

Miep Gies was a Catholic woman who protected several Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from the Nazis during World War II. She was born Hermine Santrouschitz in Vienna, Austria, to an extremely poor family. As she was born during the First World War, she barely had anything to eat due to the shortage of food and was malnourished in her childhood days. In order to improve her health, her family decided to utilize a relief project for Austrian children and put her on a train to the Netherlands where was taken in by a Dutch family. A few years later, Gies started working with a Jewish businessman named Otto Frank. He had moved to the Netherlands from Germany with his family to get away from Nazi persecution. She later became a close friend of the Frank family and helped them for two years while they were hiding. Gies was the last surviving member of the group of five non-Jewish people who had helped hide eight Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from the Nazis. She managed to rescue Anne Frank's private diary and gave it back to her father, Otto, the only one of those eight Jews to survive the Holocaust. Many believe that without Gies, the world would have never known about the diary of Anne Frank.