Anne Frank: Remembered is an autobiography by Miep Gies, the woman who housed the Frank family in secret during the Nazi regime’s extermination of the Jewish people during World War II. The book chronicles the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands, including Gies’ own accounts of the various sanctuaries she observed or facilitated as some of the Dutch people took humanitarian action against Hitler’s atrocities. These families include the famous Frank family, of which the young Anne wrote the journal that would later be published, posthumously, as The Diary of Anne Frank. Lacking a central point or resolution for the tragedy, Miep’s book turns mainly to the lived experience of the Holocaust, returning to a number of views which vigorously oppose the Nazis and wider Europe’s persecution of the Jewish people. Miep begins her autobiography by briefly visiting her childhood. Born in Vienna, Austria to a long line of Austrians, she lived in an impoverished family with her mother and father until she was eleven. During that year, she was inducted into a program that aided sick and malnourished children. The program sent her to Amsterdam, and put her up for adoption by a Dutch family. Miep came to know and love Holland as if it were her native home, and came to identify as Dutch rather than Viennese. In Miep’s young adulthood, she first came into contact with the Frank family after becoming employed by the Pectacon Company. Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, owned the company, which produced an ingredient for jam called pectin. There, Miep quickly rose through the factory’s ranks, until she was given an office job. She got to know Mr. Frank and his wife and kids, and often was invited to meals at their house. She went on to marry a man named Jan. Meanwhile, the roots of the Holocaust were forming in Europe. The persecution of the Jews began subtly, with various, seemingly arbitrary but non-trivial legal sanctions against them. In the summer of 1942, as it became apparent that Hitler had an insidious agenda for the Jewish people, Miep and Jan helped the Frank family hide in a number of hidden rooms in the Pectacon Company, since they could no longer openly live in Amsterdam. Mr. Frank continued to direct the company from hiding via his non-Jewish friends, Mr. Koophuis and Mr. Kraler. Miep discusses the various tasks she and the Frank family performed to stay alive and obfuscate their presence in Amsterdam. She and Jan managed to get a surplus of ration cards to take care of the whole family, including several other people they helped hide, the Van Daan family and Dr. Dussel. Each day, she risked her life, while becoming the Franks’ only tie to the external world and the resources they needed. On August 4, 1944, the difficult but seemingly stable system Miep and the Franks had developed dissolved when their home was raided by the Nazis. Everyone in hiding was sent to concentration camps. In the aftermath of this tragic raid, Miep went to gather their belongings. It was during this search that she found Anne’s diary; she kept it until the end of the war. At the beginning of 1945, World War II finally ended, and the remaining Jews were liberated from Hitler’s camps. Otto Frank turned out to be the only survivor who lived in Miep’s home. He came back to live with her and Jan and resumed his role in his company, which Miep had sustained as he suffered in a concentration camp. Upon receiving news that Anne and Margo, Otto’s two daughters, were confirmed dead, Miep gave him Anne’s diary, which he proceeded to publish. Anne lived on through this diary, which became hugely popular as one of the most moving testaments to the incredible resilience and suffering of humankind. Gies’ autobiography comes from a unique position with respect to the Holocaust: she was both an insider and outsider, rendered immune from Hitler’s wrath by heritage but willingly implicated by her willingness to help those he wanted to kill. The novel is thus doubly a condemnation of the horrors she witnessed, and proof that even in moments of unprecedented atrocity and pain, resistance in all its forms matters and contributes to a better future.

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Miep Gies

Adult

Autobiography / Memoir

Nonfiction

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