Miep Gies was a secretary at Opekta, a small pectin company in Amsterdam run by Otto Frank. When the Frank family went into hiding in a concealed annex above the office in July 1942, Gies became one of a handful of helpers who kept eight people alive for twenty-five months. She bought food on the black market. She brought library books, news of the outside world, and spices for birthday cakes. She lied to Nazi investigators. She climbed those stairs every day knowing that if she was caught, the punishment was death.
On August 4, 1944, the Gestapo raided the annex. Gies was not arrested — one of the officers, an Austrian, let her go when she told him she was born in Vienna. After the police took the families away, Gies went back into the ransacked annex and found a pile of scattered papers on the floor. She recognized Anne Frank's handwriting. She gathered the pages and locked them in her desk drawer, unread, planning to return them when Anne came home.
Anne did not come home. She died in Bergen-Belsen in early 1945. Gies gave the papers to Otto Frank, the only member of the hiding group to survive. He published them. The book has since been translated into seventy languages and read by tens of millions of people.
Gies spent the rest of her life refusing the word "hero." She said she had done nothing special, that anyone would have done the same. She was wrong about that, and the fact that she believed it is part of what made her extraordinary.
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."