The woman who saved Anne Frank's diary from the Nazis, Miep Gies, died on Monday after a brief illness, her website announced. She was 100 years old.
According to the BBC's website, Gies died in a nursing home after suffering a fall just before Christmas.
Gies was the last surviving and best known of the group who helped Frank's family hide from the Nazis.
She collected and hid the teenager's diary after the German secret police discovered their hiding place in an Amsterdam office building.
Anne Frank with her diary (Photo: AP)
Anne died from disease at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but her father Otto returned from Auschwitz and Gies gave him his daughter's diary.
The teenager's memoir, first published in 1947, became one of the most renowned accounts of Jews hiding from Nazi persecution.
Born Hermine (Miep) Santruschitz in Vienna in 1909, she moved to the Netherlands at age 11, according to a biography published on her website: www.miepgies.nl. In 1933, she began working for Otto Frank at his Opekta trading company.
At great risk to her own safety, she helped bring food to the Franks and another family who went into hiding in a secret annex of Opekta's office building from 1942 until their discovery and arrest in 1944.
RSS
