Jan Gies, the man who helped hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis in the Amsterdam “secret annex,” died Tuesday at the age of 87.
Gies, together his wife Miep, helped hide the Frank family and four other Jews in an upstairs hidden loft above Otto Frank’s own business from July 1942 until August 1944, when the entire group was discovered by the German Gestapo.
Anne later died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. All but Otto Frank perished in concentration camps. He returned to the annex behind the bookcase after the war and retrieved Anne’s diary.
The moving Holocaust story of how the non-Jewish Gies couple protected the Franks has been unforgettably etched in history by the surviving diary of the teen-age Anne. “The Diary of Anne Frank” has been published around the world and translated into scores of different languages
Reacting to news of Gies’ death, Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in New York, “The only light in the dark of the murderous Nazi regime were those like Jan Gies who risked their lives to protect Jews.”
The ADL honored the couple in 1987 with its Courage to Care award. The couple also received an award in 1988 from the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem.
The Gies couple for many years shunned publicity, but the American author Allison Leslie Gold eventually persuaded Miep Gies to tell her story.
Miep’s recounting of the story, “Anne Frank Remembered,” was published in English in 1987.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
