Condolences flow in for Miep Gies, Anne Frank's protector

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Condolences poured in Tuesday for Miep Gies, the last survivor among Anne Frank's protectors and the woman who preserved the diary that endures as a testament to the human spirit in the face of unfathomable evil, the Anne Frank Museum said. She died Monday night at age 100.

The British Broadcasting Corp. said Gies suffered a fall late last month and died at a nursing home.

An online registry logged about 100 condolences per hour Tuesday, said museum spokeswoman Annemarie Bekker.

Israeli President Shimon Peres, in a letter to Dutch Queen Beatrix, said Gies "won the hearts of all of us" through her efforts to save the Frank family and rescue the diary.

"I am not a hero," Gies wrote in her memoir, "Anne Frank Remembered," published in 1987. "I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did and more — much more — during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always like yesterday in the heart of those of us who bear witness."

Gies (whose full name is pronounced 'Meep Khees') sought no accolades for joining with her husband and three others in hiding Anne Frank, her father, mother and older sister and four other Dutch Jews for 25 months in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. But she came to be viewed as a courageous figure when her role in sheltering Anne Frank was revealed with the publication of her memoir. She then traveled the world while in her 80s, speaking against intolerance. The West German government presented her with its highest civilian medal in 1989, and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands knighted her in 1996.

When the Gestapo raided the hiding place in the annex to Otto Frank's business office on Aug. 4, 1944, and arrested its eight occupants, it left behind his daughter Anne's diary and her writings on loose sheets of papers. The journals recounted life in those rooms behind a movable bookcase and the hopes of a girl on the brink of womanhood. Gies gathered up those writings and hid them, unread, hoping that Anne would someday return to claim them.

But when Anne's father, Otto Frank, returned to Amsterdam at the end of World War II, having been liberated from Auschwitz, he was the lone survivor of the family. Anne Frank had died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp three months before her 16th birthday. Her sister, Margot, died there at age 19 and their mother, Edith Frank, died at Auschwitz.