BBC News
Monday, 11 January 2010
Miep Gies, the last surviving member of the group who helped protect Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis, has died in the Netherlands aged 100.
She and other employees of Anne Frank’s father Otto supplied food to the family as they hid in a secret annex above the business premises in Amsterdam.
Anne’s diary of their life in hiding, which ended in betrayal, is one of the most famous records of the Holocaust.
Mrs Gies died in a nursing home after suffering a fall at Christmas.
Speaking last year as she celebrated her 100th birthday, Mrs Gies played down her role, saying others had done far more to protect Jews in the Netherlands.
She and her fellow employees kept Anne and the seven others supplied for two years, from 1942 to 1944.
When the family were found by the authorities, they were deported, and Anne died of typhus in the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.
It was Mrs Gies who collected up Anne’s papers and locked them away, hoping that one day she would be able to give them back to the girl.
In the event, she returned them to Otto Frank, who survived the war, and helped him compile them into a diary that was published in 1947.
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