Miep Gies Quotes

But even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, within their own small ways, turn on a small light in a dark room.

People should never think that you have to be a very special person to help those who need you.

You are the heroes. You are the heroes everyday.

We did our duty as human beings: helping people in need.

Any attempt at action is better than inaction. An attempt can go wrong, but inaction inevitably results in failure

Jan Gies won’t need to. He’ll let his wife ride piggyback, and then Miep

These unusual times were quickly making for unusual arrangements.

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.

The last entry in Anne’s diary is dated August 1, 1944. On August 4, 1944, the eight people hiding in the Secret Annex were arrested. Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, the two secretaries working in the building, found Anne’s diaries strewn all over the floor. Miep Gies tucked them away in a desk drawer for safekeeping. After the war, when it became clear that Anne was dead, she gave the diaries, unread, to Anne’s father, Otto Frank.

When we are shocked to think that six million children, women, and men were driven to their deaths and we ask ourselves, “How could such a thing happen?” We should keep in mind the indifference of normal human beings the world over, good, hardworking, and often God-fearing individuals. Of course, it was the Nazi regime that was responsible for the mass murder, but if not for the apathy of people not just in Germany and Austria but everywhere—basically decent people, no doubt—the horrible slaughter could never have assumed the proportions it did. A note by Miep Gies, Amsterdam, January 1998

Anne Frank was only one of the Nazi’s victims. But her fate helps us grasp the immense loss the world suffered because of the Holocaust. Anne has touched the hearts and minds of millions; she has enriched all of our lives. Let us hope she has also enlarged our horizons. It is important for all of us to realize how much Anne and the other victims, each in his or her own way, would have contributed to our society had they been allowed to live. To my great and abiding sorrow, I was not able to save Anne’s life. But I was able to help her live two years longer. In those two years she wrote the diary that gives hope to people all over the world and calls for understanding and tolerance. It confirms my conviction that any attempt at action is better than inaction. An attempt can go wrong, but inaction inevitably results in failure. I was able to save Anne’s diary and thus make her greatest wish come true. “I want to be useful or give pleasure to the people around me yet who don’t really know me,” she wrote in her diary on March 25, 1944, about one year before her death. “I want to go on living, even after my death!” And on May 11, she noted: “You’ve known for a long time that my greatest wish is to become a journalist someday and later on a famous writer.” Through her diary Anne really does live on. She stands for the triumph of the spirit over evil and death. A note by Miep Gies, Amsterdam, January 1998

It is often said that Anne symbolizes the six million victims of the Holocaust. I consider this statement wrong. Anne's life and death were her own individual fate, an individual fate that happened six million times over.

The movie theaters showed an anti-Semitic newsreel called “The Eternal Jew,” but as we’d stopped going to the movies, neither Henk nor I saw it. Books that the Germans didn’t like were removed from our libraries and bookshops. It was said that they were also making changes in school textbooks to suit their ideology.

On February 12, 1941, the Dutch Nazi newspaper reported that Jews with sharpened teeth had ripped open the necks of Nazi soldiers and sucked their blood like vampires. The depths of the Nazi lies and depravity shook us all.

My story is a story of very ordinary people during extraordinarily terrible times. Times the like of which I hope with all my heart will never, never come again. It is for all of us ordinary people all over the world to see to it that they do not. MIEP GIES

HITLER’S VOICE on the radio had become even more hysterical, his words often not making much sense. It was obvious to us all that he was trying to breathe new fury into his retreating troops. He shouted about new miracle weapons that his factories were producing which would soon inflict crushing blows on the advancing armies of the Allies. His voice had become hysterical, the voice of a desperate fanatic, rather than that of a leader of armies and men.

in silence we all shared the same sorrow and memories.

The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition was published. This new, expanded

Kugel wondered if in these days of the Internet you would even need a Miep Gies anymore, if you could make it through a genocide these days with just a smartphone and a credit card, and he was hopeful that in the event of another Holocaust, he would have some sort of broadband Internet access.