Megan's Reviews > Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family

I recently reread, "The Diary of Anne Frank" and while it is a very moving and wonderful journal it left me with so many questions about how the hiding place really worked out for so many months. The answer is Miep Gies. Now she was an amazing woman. Vienna born and Dutch by marriage she was a good friend to the Frank family and worked in Otto Frank's pectin store front for many years before they went into hiding. She shopped and came for visits and offered comfort and support to the people in the annex daily. Some days she would have to shop for hours before she found enough food with all the shortages and rationing to feed the group. Her husband Henk was a member of the resistance party and they had a Jew hiding in their own apartment rooms too. I was just amazed at how devoted she (and the few other office workers who knew) was to those in her care. The business was changed into one of the office workers names so that it could continue to flourish even during the war. Mr. Frank would still make plans and decisions from the annex and Anne and Margot would come down at night and do office work for Miep and Elli (an office girl). Miep talks about the day the whole group was arrested and how she and Henk even twenty plus years later still observed a day of silence in memory of their friends. Miep went to Nazi headquarters and met with the highest ranked Nazi available and asked to buy the Franks back with no luck right after they were arrested. When Mr. Frank was released he lived with Miep, Henk, and their son Paul for eight years before he moved and remarried. During this time he was distributing Anne's diary which Miep had illegally recovered from the annex the day they were arrested. She kept all the pages in an unlocked drawer in her office desk and never looked at them. She safely returned them to Mr. Frank the day he was sent word that Anne and Margot had died in the prison camp. Such an inspiring woman and book.