Miep Gies Quote

During the hiding time I lived for the day that the war would end, when I would be able to go into the hiding place, throw open the doors, and say to my friends, Now go home! This was not to be. Perhaps when the time comes for me to join Jan and our friends in the hereafter, I’ll push aside the bookcase, walk behind it, climb the steep wooden stairway, careful not to hit my head on the low ceiling where Peter nailed the old towel to it. Upstairs Jan will be leaning against the edge of the dresser, his long legs stretched out, the cat Mouschi in his arms. All the others will be sitting around the table and will greet me when I enter. And Anne, with her usual curiosity, will get up and rush toward me saying, Hello, Miep. What is the news? I doubt I have very long to wait. People ask me what it is like to have outlived almost everyone whose history I have shared. It is a strange feeling. Why me? Why was I spared the concentration camp after being caught helping to hide Jews? This I will never know.

Miep Gies

During the hiding time I lived for the day that the war would end, when I would be able to go into the hiding place, throw open the doors, and say to my friends, Now go home! This was not to be. Perhaps when the time comes for me to join Jan and our friends in the hereafter, I’ll push aside the bookcase, walk behind it, climb the steep wooden stairway, careful not to hit my head on the low ceiling where Peter nailed the old towel to it. Upstairs Jan will be leaning against the edge of the dresser, his long legs stretched out, the cat Mouschi in his arms. All the others will be sitting around the table and will greet me when I enter. And Anne, with her usual curiosity, will get up and rush toward me saying, Hello, Miep. What is the news? I doubt I have very long to wait. People ask me what it is like to have outlived almost everyone whose history I have shared. It is a strange feeling. Why me? Why was I spared the concentration camp after being caught helping to hide Jews? This I will never know.

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About Miep Gies

Hermine "Miep" Gies (Dutch: [mip ˈxis]; née Santrouschitz; 15 February 1909 – 11 January 2010) was one of the Dutch citizens who hid Anne Frank, her family (Otto, Margot, Edith) and four other Dutch Jews (Fritz Pfeffer, Hermann van Pels, Auguste van Pels, Peter van Pels) from the Nazis in an annex above Otto Frank's business premises during World War II. She was Austrian by birth, but in 1920, at the age of eleven, she was taken in as a foster child by a Dutch family in Leiden to whom she became very attached. Although she was only supposed to stay for six months, this stay was extended to one year because of frail health, after which Gies chose to remain with them, living the rest of her life in the Netherlands.
In 1933, Gies began working for Otto Frank, a Jewish businessman who had moved with his family from Germany to the Netherlands in the hope of sparing his family from Nazi persecution. She became a close, trusted friend of the Frank family and was a great support to them during the twenty-five months they spent in hiding. Together with her colleague Bep Voskuijl, she retrieved Anne Frank's diary after the family was arrested, and kept the papers safe until Otto Frank returned from Auschwitz in June 1945 and learned of his younger daughter's death soon afterwards. Gies had stored Anne Frank's papers in the hopes of returning them to the girl, but gave them to Otto Frank, who compiled them into a diary first published in June 1947.
In collaboration with Alison Leslie Gold, Gies wrote the book Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family in 1987. She died in 2010 at age 100.