"Anne Frank Remembered" by Miep Gies and Alison Leslie Gold (1987)

 

Immediately as I finished Anne Frank diary, I started this book. "Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family" was written by Miep Gies who worked as a secretary for Otto Frank and who (along with several other employees in his office) knew and supported family in hiding. In fact, she was the main person responsible for bringing them food during years in the hiding place. Since she was so close involved in everything, her story very closely matches Anne Frank's diary but with a wider perspective - while Anne was basically describing what the life in hiding looked like, Miep Gies could tell more about the atmosphere in the city during the war, the dangers of everyday life in occupied Amsterdam and her own point of view. While Anne's diary was moving, this was less sentimental, more realistic close look at reality around  them during those years. 

By some incredible accident that later proved to be extremely important, Miep Gies was the right person in the right time: she was born in Vienna and sent to The Netherlands as a child to recuperate from hunger and weak health. That means that she spoke fluent German and Dutch, which was helpful when she came in contact with the rest of Frank family, who often privately spoke German. Because she refused to join Nazi women's group, her Austrian passport was invalidated and she was supposed to be deported back to Austria, until she eventually got married to her Dutch boyfriend. On the day of arrest, it was Austrian SS officer Silberbauer who discovered the hiding place and who also arrested the men working in Otto Frank's office but did not want to arrest a fellow Austrian girl (another girl, Bep have escaped and went into hiding herself). So Miep was let go and it was herself who went quickly in the attic and saved Anne Frank's diary (the rest of what was in the hiding place, all the clothes, personal property and furniture was confiscated). 

I find this book incredibly gripping because, more than even Anne's diary itself, it describes first hand witness to war years in Amsterdam. This is someone who actually biked trough the occupied city every day on her way to work (until it became too dangerous because Germans could steal her bike, so she had to walk) and constantly searched for the food to feed her friends. Miep herself was not completely aware of the tensions between people in hiding and we understand that in front of her they all kept their mutual arguments hidden. She could tell there was some sort of unpleasant atmosphere but this is understandable considering the situation and lack of privacy. After the arrest of Frank family and their friends, Miep went trough a difficult hunger period during 1944-1945 and she describes in detail how hard it was to survive winter without electricity, gas, heat and food. Luckily she survived and even welcomed Otto Frank back when he returned from Germany (he lived with Miep and her husband for a while, as his family perished in concentration camps). There is also a Oscar-winning documentary with the same name as the book and I was glad to find out that Miep was actually given standing ovation during award ceremony. 

"People every-where in Amsterdam were perishing daily of starvation. Sometimes they would just sit down at the side of the road and die. Sometimes they were so weak that they died of diphtheria, typhoid, or just the cold. Neighborhood soup kitchens had been set up, and each day people would line up in the cold to get a bucket of something warm to put in their stomachs.

All day people scavenged for bits of coal in the old coal yards. Railroad ties were dug up for the wood. If you had a wooden staircase standing in the garden or against the wall outside, you might wake up in the morning and find your staircase gone. Any houses left empty were stripped of wood from windows, stairways, furniture, anything."