A milestone for a heroine: Miep Gies
Miep Gies, who was responsible for helping the Frank family hide in Amsterdam during World War II, turned one hundred years old on Sunday. It couldn’t happen to a nicer person.
To know the mettle of this woman, you must read her book Anne Frank Remembered. Her upright and quietly courageous spirit shine through every page.
As with most heroes and heroines, Gies is of the opinion that her efforts to secretly feed, clothe, house, comfort, and entertain the inhabitants of what Anne called the Secret Annex—activities that put Gies’ own safety at great risk—were nothing special. I beg to differ.
For example:
These contacts [Gies and the other “helpers”] provided the only connection between the outside world and the occupants of the house, and they kept the occupants informed of war news and political developments. They catered for all of their needs, ensured their safety and supplied them with food, a task that grew more difficult with the passage of time. Anne wrote of their dedication and of their efforts to boost morale within the household during the most dangerous of times. All were aware that if caught they could face the death penalty for sheltering Jews.
When I first read Gies’ memoir many years ago, it struck me that, if the Frank family had not been treacherously betrayed and their hiding place discovered in August of 1944, they might have starved anyway during that last terrible year before the war ended. In her book, Gies describes such widespread food shortages (Gies herself almost died of hunger) that it’s hard to believe that she could have kept supplying the inhabitants of the Annex with enough food to have somehow kept them all alive.
When I read the book, I was also impressed with the fact that Gies had stored away Anne’s diaries without reading them. Her thought was to return them to Anne herself after the war. When this proved impossible, she gave them to Anne’s father Otto, the only survivor of the original seven who were sheltered in the Annex.
The rest, as they say, is history.
It’s horrible that we occasionally have need of such heroes, just as it is inspiring that we have such people among us when they are truely needed.
This woman is a true heroine, and any accomplishments of mere politicians, pop culture idols, or sports figures pales in comparison.
So much of the tragic story rested with chance. The failed airborne invasion of Holland probably sealed Anne’s fate. While taking place a month after her family’s discovery, if successful, would have brought the war to an end much sooner.
The result of the failure was the food shortages you mentioned, when Germans denied food shipments to a sympathetic populace in reprisal for supporting it, and a prolongation of the war, to last long enough for Anne to die just before liberation.
Lovely tribute. I had no idea that Gies was still alive.
Imagine what Ms. Gies must be thinking, watching the transpiring events these days as Jews are again the focus of Hitler’s old allies, the muslims, and with significant complicity from Europe’s left. Simultaneously Obama and the Democrats are getting situated to “railroad” the Israelis into a “Judenrein land for peace (suicide)” agreement with a Hamas-Fatah coalition, marked by indefensible borders, in another decade. The muslims are licking their chops…
Perfected democrat,
Not necessarily disagreeing with the basic thrust of your observations, but will point out that there is an awful lot of bad blood between Fatah and Hamas at the moment.
Hamas literally was throwing Fatah leadership off the roofs of buildings in Gaza when they took over, and Fatah is rumored to have assisted Israel in targeting Hamas during their latest foray into Gaza.
Other than that, yeah, you got it about right on….
Given the European history of the past 100 years as well as the current influx of Muslim immigrants into old Europe, how any jew could contemplate cooporation in the current environment is beyond my ability to understand.
how about reading “dear god i wanted to live” by Ruta U?
a similar book that didnt hide the reality of the situation in a fog of religion. (which is why we almost never talk about the other 6 million – or stalins or maos…)
i mentioned it before, but i can tell no one read it… because you cant read it and not comment. anne frank had it easy compared to lots of others we dont get to hear about
its so little known since germans now are equated with jew hatred rather than prol hatred that only 1920 results come up on google. while the diary of anne frank has a half million.
after reading this other book from my own country, i realized that they took one facet, and made it shine brighter than all the others, and in so doing, used one attrocity to erase the many.
the book is small, can be read in one or two sittings, and its a similar text…
but this one didnt have people like a few here who saw things coming, prepared, and then had ways of skirting.
hiding people was not an uncommon thing
in fact if you read about the war, you will literally find thousands of stories. but the only ones you hear abotu over and over have to do with jews.
you hear defiance, schindlers list, anne frank…
you dont hear about british escaped soldiers, others who got caught, familes that tried to save anyone, not just jews.
this is not to belittle that they survived, and such.
but to belittle those who celebrate this as special when it was so common, we forgot how many did this.
here is someone commenting it on the holiday where they remember the removal of people
As a university student in the Cold War’s later years, I treasured a book about a
14 year old Latvian girl’s plight as she was deported with her younger sisters, mother and grandmother in the June 14 1941 mass deportations. Fearing
reprisals against family members and friends, the surname of the girl was kept
anonymous as the manuscript was secretly brought out of Soviet Latvia after her
death in 1967 by family friends. The book reads not as a literary piece but rather
a diarised account of her family’s deportation to Siberia. It represents a wasted
youth and a destroyed life — the girl’s mother and grandmother died within two
years of exile in inhuman and intolerable conditions, the two youngest sisters
were placed in a state children’s home while the eldest was forced to work with
other adults and adolescents in the Siberian pine forests. It was only after 5 years
of living at the edge of human existence that the three sisters returned to Soviet
occupied Latvia. In a way they were lucky to survive, in another sense they were
to be victimised yet again in another deportation in 1951, this time with their
father. Tellingly, this young girl struggled with her health after the first
deportation. In what should have been her best years, she battled tuberculosis
and died after her second return to Latvia in 1957. She was only 31 years old. To
this day, her account titled
Dear God, I Wanted to Live
remains as a representative reminder to later generations of the sheer horror and dreadful
conditions deportees had to face.
Many families have similar sobering accounts of their experiences. Soviet Russia
used deportation as a multi-faceted tool to provide cheap labour and break the
will of the Baltic people. It is not surprising that those few that survived both
waves of repression were broken souls, living their final years of existence in fear
and experiencing nightmares of what they had been through. Plagued by ill
health, they would have been content enough just having basic food, water and
shelter.
It is the memory of these lost people that we honour here today. Baltic people
know that theirs is a story that represents only a chapter of terror, persecution
and suffering in World War II. Stalin’s reign of terror claimed the lives of tens of
millions of people in the Soviet Union and occupied territories. July 1941 brought
the co-conspirator of the infamous 1939 pact to the Baltic countries. Nazi
Germany’s occupation to 1944-45 brought more misery, arrests and persecutions
to yet other segments of the Baltic communities. Drafting available men into the
German army as cannon fodder for the Russian front, the Nazis masked their
apparent liberation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia with their own malice and hate.
Had Hitler prevailed over the Soviet Union, documentary evidence suggests that
many Baltic peoples may have been re-colonised into parts of conquered Russia
to make way for German settlers. Not surprising really, given Nazi Germany’s
equally treacherous role in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Geographically located
between two evil superpowers, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were treated as
mere pawns on a chessboard.
The difficult political situation of the times is reflected in the memoirs of the then
Latvian military attaché to Berlin, Aleksandrs Plensners. Already in the summer of
1939, the Latvian embassy in Berlin had advised the Latvian government that it
was illusory to assume that there would not be a major war. It was their strong
opinion that Germany would be the one to commence the war and in that event,
Latvia’s neutrality would be inconsequential, leading to inevitable occupation by
either Germany or the Soviet Union.
By that time, there was little the Baltic nations could do. Their destinies were
being shaped elsewhere.
Having not lived through these harsh times, I highly commend to all younger
generations of Baltic descendants and indeed to the world at large to make an
odyssey to visit the various history and occupation museums in the Baltic nations
and indeed the deeply moving Hill of Crosses near Siauliai. During the Soviet
occupation planting a cross to commemorate a Lithuanian victim of Soviet
repression was an arrest able offence. The hill was bulldozed three times and in
1961 the Red Army destroyed the crosses. But at night time more crosses appeared. The Hill is both a sobering and wonderful testament to the passion and resolution of the Lithuanian people.
You will note that, probably due to lack of time, Hitler was a piker in the murder business compared to Stalin. And Hitler gets all the grief while Stalin’s crimes are hardly mentioned. Nobody calls a political opponent “Stalin!”
Too many living people and institutions with hidden baggage, is my guess.
Scottie and Art… I’m 100% with you, I long ago (with my now vague Lithuanian Jewish roots) tired of the Shoah narrative being the exclusively continued focus in the presence of more current horrors; However, and not to dwell on it necessarily, but to qualify it as a unique crime by it’s magnitude in destroying such a large proportion of a single group. The sheer numbers and horror in the other genocides are no less important, and certainly perhaps greater in some respects, but at the end of the day some of these mass murders still left the vast majority of the target group alive, ie. China and Russia.
I’m well aware of the rivalry between Fatah and Hamas, but they can eventually overcome that rivalry with a combination of their ultimate shared goals of destroying the Jews, and when they are eventually presented with more financial support than they can pragmatically resist, much like Egypt… Obama, the moslem-communist posing as a Christian Democrat, is a unique actor and character, and in a unique position to set that stage. The scene could only be more ominous if Obama was president, but Saddam was still in power. People don’t have enough respect for what Bush and the American military accomplished in Iraq, and the profound long range implications. It’s only been several weeks and it looks like the Democrats are hell bent to blow it…
“Too many living people and institutions with hidden baggage, is my guess.”
Well spoken, but I’m beginning to think that there are deeply inculcated cultural roots which defy all rationality and logic. It’s what makes hate so insidious and able to transcend so many generations. By the same token, the sheer tenacity, the survival instinct of some target groups (ie. the Jews) is amazing….
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todays paper
Brooklyn man searching for girl his family hid during Holocaust
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2009/02/15/2009-02-15_brooklyn_man_searching_for_girl_his_fami.html
Four years ago, Pieniak moved to Brooklyn to be with his daughter. He contacted the Daily News after reading an interview in a local Polish paper with News reporter Erin Einhorn, who wrote “The Pages in Between,” a book about the Polish family who saved her mother from the Nazis.
sorry missed putting in that part of the article…
that makes 4 stories of which only one is widely known… and given the time and people, there literally were hundreds of such stories if not thousands given the numbers involved.
> her efforts to secretly feed, clothe, house, comfort, and entertain the inhabitants of what Anne called the Secret Annex–activities that put Gies’ own safety at great risk–were nothing special
No, it should be nothing special. Such behavior should be commonplace.
Of course, I should have millions in assets and be married to Elle MacPherson.
In many ways the universe is found wanting…
:oP
> So much of the tragic story rested with chance. The failed airborne invasion of Holland probably sealed Anne’s fate.
That depends. Operation Market Garden was a foolish idea from a bunch of still-mired-in-old-tactics generals, who did not grasp the entire lesson of Blitzkreig, unlike Patton.
If Patton had been properly supplied he might have been able to collapse Germany all by himself, thus ending the war well before the end of 1944.
The effect on not only the war, but also the whole conflict as well as the Cold War would have been… interesting.
On the European Front, Germany probably would have been, and remained, unified, since the USSR would have been barely out of Russia at that point.
OTOH, it would have turned the US back onto Japan and the Pacific far sooner than the Bomb was ready, so that battle would have had limited alternatives and likely resulted in far more casualties (US and/or Japan, depending largely on whether invasion or blockade was chosen). And, oddly, it might have been Japan which was partitioned instead of Germany: One of the main reasons for using the Bomb on Japan was to get their surrender quickly, before the USSR could turn towards Japan and get involved there.
It’s always interesting, during the study of history, to see how, sometimes, the vast course of history apparently turned on a surprisingly little event.
Another such case was The Battle of Antietam, which hinged very much on the fate of Special Order 191, and could have been even more critical had McLellan not been completely incompetent as a general.
P.S.
To get a feel for McClellan (sorry, misspelled it before), realize that he had a habit of signing his missives with the rather pretentious
“Gen. George B. McClellan, Headquarters In The Saddle”,
which supposedly led Lincoln to quip,
“The problem with this general is that his headquarters are where his hindquarters ought to be”.
😛
obloodyhell.
Problem with Market Garden was that the Brit para officers kept arranging airborne ops and finding the legs got there first. So they had to go a bridge too far in order to be assured of beating the legs.
One intel guy who told them that the Krauts had two divisions resting in the Arnhem area was sent to a rest home.
Problem with alternate strategies is that you usually presume the enemy does what he did in the face of the real thing. Market Garden put a couple of US airborne divisions and a bunch of Brit armor on the road through Holland toward the Ruhr. One lonely bridge delayed but did not stop the northern threat–engineers build bridges all the time–and the Germans had to honor the threat. Had it not existed, the German forces involved in preparing for the northern thrust could have been used in the south against Patton and Bradley.
No free lunches in this game.
Well according to Iranian president Lostmydinnerjacket the holocaust didn’t happen so this whole episode was probably a fabrication too – right?
Richard wrote:
Hitler gets all the grief while Stalin’s crimes are hardly mentioned. Nobody calls a political opponent “Stalin!”
Too many living people and institutions with hidden baggage, is my guess.
– – – – – – – – – –
You mean you expect the media and academia – the two places where opponents are routinely labeled “Nazis” – to say something bad about a socialist leader – especially the one billed as The Light of the World?
Not expect. How about wish?
Obloodyhell,
Actually, it was General John Pope who signed orders and letters “headquarters in the saddle”, prompting his own troops to comment “he didn’t know his headquarters from his hindquarters”.
“Lee Takes Command” Time-Life Books, 1984
This guy was such a loser, Lincoln re-appointed McClellan to command.