This ‘ordinary’ woman hid Anne Frank—and kept her story alive
The miniseries ‘A Small Light’ tells the story of Miep Gies, a courageous young woman who risked her life to defy the Nazis.
When she could no longer protect the family—when the Nazis finally came and took them away in 1944—Gies kept their story alive by saving Anne Frank’s journals. She’s the reason the world has The Diary of a Young Girl.
Later in Gies’s life, people called her heroic. Believing she simply did what she could in evil times, she is said to have made this response: “Even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, within their own small ways, turn on a small light in a dark room.”
Miep’s extraordinary kindness was part of a circle of selfless deeds. She had already known the ravages of a world war. Twenty-two years before the Franks went into
