For more than two years, Miep helped the Franks and four other people evade the Gestapo by bringing food, comfort and news of the world to them in a tiny hideout in the canal-side building that housed the family business.
It all ended on August 4, 1944, when their hiding place was betrayed and the family was arrested by the Nazis. A few hours later, wandering mournfully through the four small upstairs rooms, Miep discovered the plaid-cloth-covered diary kept by the young teenager.
By saving the diary from the debris left by the Nazis, Miep Gies made sure that Anne Frank’s name was known around the world – since its initial publication in 1947, The Diary of Anne Frank has sold more than 25 million copies in 54 languages. After the Bible, it is the most widely read book in the world – for many children, their first direct brush with the horrors of the Holocaust. Though Anne Frank never lived to see her 16th birthday, her innermost thoughts scribbled on scraps of paper still challenge us a full fifty years after her death …and Miep Gies Almost destroyed the diary, she said if she had known the contents she would have destroyed it.
If she had opened it just once, we would never have known Anne’s story.
