The dark-haired girl was Anne Frank, whose extraordinary diary, written in the years before her death at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, has made her the single most recognizable victim of the Holocaust.
The red-haired girl is my mother, Brunhilde Bachenheimer, and when I climbed the narrow stairs to Anne Frank’s hiding place 30 years ago, I was overcome with the realization that my own family had so narrowly escaped a similar fate.
Miep Gies, shown in a picture from the war years, is about to turn 98
On a return trip to Amsterdam in 1998, I felt an intense need to connect with Anne’s life and story on a deeper level. I wrote a note to Miep Gies, who had become an employee and friend of Anne’s father, Otto, in 1933. Back then, Miep took an immediate liking to the vivacious and intelligent Anne, thinking, “This is the kind of child I’d like to have someday.”
In 1942, the brutal oppression of Dutch Jews by the Nazi occupiers of Holland escalated, with an increase in deportations. After Anne’s sister was ordered sent to Germany, Otto Frank approached his loyal bookkeeper and asked if she and her husband, Jan, would be willing to risk their lives by hiding the Franks and four other Jews. Miep’s immediate reply: “Of course.”
For the next 25 perilous months, Miep, Jan (whose name was disguised as “Henk” in the diary), and three others provided food and comfort for those in the “Secret Annex.” Anne often wrote about her would-be saviors, calling them “noble and unselfish.” “Never have we heard one word of the burden we must certainly be to them. Never has one of them complained.” She singled out the fearless Miep for particular praise. “Miep is just like a pack mule; she fetches and carries so much.” On May 8, 1944, she marvels, “It seems as if we are never far from Miep’s thoughts.”
Soon after, the diary abruptly ends, as the Franks are betrayed, arrested and deported. Two of those who hid the group were sent to concentration camps. Miep, who had supplied nearly all the notebooks for her young friend’s diary, was determined to retrieve them, despite the enormous threat from the watchful Nazis. She managed to find and hide Anne’s precious work of literature for a year, until official word came that Anne was dead. On that dreadful day, Miep reached into her desk drawer, removed the sheaves of paper and handed them to a shattered Otto Frank, the only survivor of the eight hidden Jews. “Here,” she told him, “is your daughter Anne’s legacy to you.”
I wanted to touch this living link to that awesome moment, to shake her hand, to say thank you. Not long after sending my note, the phone rang in my Amsterdam hotel room. “Mr. North? This is Miep Gies. Can you come here tomorrow?”
The next morning, I entered Miep’s tiny apartment, located over a bicycle shop. There she was: short, sturdy, white-haired, with a firm handshake and an almost visible aura of kindness. Speaking in both English and German, the Vienna-born woman pointed to a poignant oil painting of a young girl looking wistfully through a window. “This is my Anne,” she said, “the real Anne, like I remember her.”
Later, Miep showed me a small, graceful mahogany piece of furniture. It was a writing desk that had belonged to Anne’s mother, Edith, a priceless gift to Miep from Otto after the war. I touched its smooth surface, and imagined Anne sitting there, doing her schoolwork or composing stories, in the years before she went into hiding.
Miep let me peruse the thousands of letters she had received from schoolchildren, all neatly catalogued in huge looseleaf binders, many asking the same thing: why did you risk your life? She does not really understand the question. “It was simple; I did not think about myself. I must do this to save the people, for my ‘Gewissen’ … for my conscience.”
I thought of those letters again this year, after seeing the new Hilary Swank movie “Freedom Writers.” It’s the true story of a class of inner-city kids who studied the Holocaust, read “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and then not only wrote to Miep Gies, but raised money to bring her to the United States a dozen years ago to speak to them. At that point, Miep had already long been the last survivor of the legendary saga.
It is, therefore, astonishing to realize that Miep is still among us, alive and well, approaching her 98th birthday on Feb. 15. Now living a somewhat reclusive life in a new apartment north of Amsterdam, near her son and three grandchildren, she has a hot meal delivered and reads two newspapers every day. Twenty years ago, she reluctantly agreed to tell her heroic story in a richly detailed book called “Anne Frank Remembered.” Her coauthor Alison Leslie Gold, who remains a close friend and visits Miep twice annually, says: “Her mind is clear, she’s still up at 8 each day, and is always dressed impeccably. Students from around the world still write to her, and with the help of an old friend, she answers every single letter.”
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, Miep told Gold, “One has to hope for the good at all times.” Despite that optimistic outlook, Miep Gies says there has not been a single day in the last six decades that she has not thought about “what happened”: how the noble scheme failed; how her friends, whom she tried so desperately to save, were murdered.
I felt that enduring sadness when I spoke about my own family during that visit with Miep. She shook her head in sorrow as I told her about relatives lost in the Holocaust, then showed her a new photo from my wallet of my mother, now known as Bunny, holding my sister’s two children. I asked her what she thought Anne might have become had she lived. “Oh, a writer, of course. A good, famous writer,” she said with a smile. Then, gazing down at the picture of my mom, she softly sighed. “And a grandmother. She would have been a grandmother.”
