The woman who rescued Anne Frank's diaries from oblivion, Miep Gies, has died aged 100 following a brief illness. Those who knew her have described her as “exceptional”.

Miep Gies was the last survivor of the people who helped the Jewish Frank family to hide from German persecutors in WWII. When an informer told the Nazis about the Franks' hideout in Amsterdam, the family members were transported to concentration camps and killed. Only Anne's father Otto survived.

Listen to an interview with David Barnouw from the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation

After the war Miep Gies gave Mr Frank his daughter's diaries, not realising they would soon become the most famous war journal in the world. David Barnouw, an authority on Anne Frank from the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, told RNW Miep Gies was a reluctant heroine at first:

"That has to do with the fact that until 1980 Otto Frank was still alive and he was Anne Frank's father so Miep Gies was more or less in the background. Then, in 1980 Otto Frank died and then Miep Gies became more and more important."

Miep's own life was marked by wartime experiences from the very beginning. Born Hermine Santrouschitz in Vienna, Austria, she was transported to Leiden in the Netherlands from the Austrian capital in December 1920 to escape the food shortages in Austria after its defeat in World War I. In 1922 she moved with her foster family to Amsterdam and met Otto Frank ten years later when she applied for the post of temporary secretary with his spice company, Opekta.

Anne Frank

Whole family in hiding
With her husband, Jan Gies, Miep helped hide Edith and Otto Frank, their daughters Margot and Anne Frank, Hermann and Auguste van Pels, their son Peter, and Fritz Pfeffer in the sealed-off back rooms of the company's office building on Amsterdam's Prinsengracht. The Amsterdam annex is now the Anne Frank museum.
 

After the hideaway group was betrayed and arrested in August 1944, Miep Gies found Anne Frank's diaries and kept them safe in a drawer for her return.
 

Once the war was over and it was confirmed that the teenager had died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, she gave them to Anne's father, Otto Frank, who was the only family member to return from the Nazi death camps after the war. The book was published in 1947 and Miep Gies soon became a well-known figure, receiving international recognition for what she did to help the Frank family.

Exceptional
David Barnouw says although she didn't see herself as special, what Miep Gies did was exceptional:

"Being in the resistance you have to focus on one or two people, otherwise you have no idea what happened. You can only say one of the problems is that alot of people in the US or Britain thinking everyone was in the resistance just like Miep Gies. But that's not true - she was an exception. She didn't think she was extraordinary, but she was. There were not many people who helped Jews."