On one of my early visits to Amsterdam, I visited Miep in her own apartment. During our conversation, she suddenly got up from her chair and went to a drawer. She wanted to share with me her mementoes of the Frank family’s time in hiding. She showed me the typed menu card that Anne had created for dinner on the one night Miep and Jan had stayed overnight in the secret annexe. It was actually Miep and Jan’s first wedding anniversary. She later described her own feelings about spending just one solitary night in the secret annexe: ‘I never slept, I couldn’t close my eyes . . . the fright of these people who were locked up in here was so thick I could feel it pressing down on me. It was like a thread of terror pulled taut.’
The other item Miep had pulled from the drawer to show me was a pencilled shopping list Edith Frank had given her for one of her dangerous errands to acquire food for the eight people in hiding. Despite the strict wartime rationing, Miep went on these risky missions to acquire food for herself, her husband and the eight people she supported in hiding (not counting the boy in their home), not once or twice, but for over two long years. Two long years of the fear that must have been attached to each of these shopping trips, relying on the goodwill of suppliers who may well have suspected her but also chose to turn a blind eye. In July 1943 Anne wrote about these vital shopping expeditions, ‘Miep has so much to carry she looks like a pack mule. She goes out nearly every day in search of vegetables, and then cycles back with her purchases in large shopping bags. She’s also the one who brings five library books with her every Saturday. We long for Saturdays because that means books.’
Whilst I was looking down in wonder at the treasured menu cards and shopping list in the palms of my hands, Miep then disappeared into her bedroom and returned holding a pair of red suede shoes of 1940s style with block heels and thick platform soles. She asked me if I knew anything about these and I nodded as I recalled this evocative entry in Anne’s diary:
Everywhere I go, upstairs or down, they all cast admiring glances at my feet, which are adorned by a pair of exceptionally beautiful (for times like these!) shoes. Miep managed to snap them up for 27.50 guilders. Burgundy coloured suede and leather with medium-sized high heels. I feel as if I’m on stilts, and look even taller than I already am.
I found myself stroking the shoes that Anne herself had worn. To be shown these items by Miep herself, and in her own home, was a special privilege that I shall always hold dear.
On another occasion I took Miep to the BBC’s Broadcasting House in the centre of London to record an interview for Woman’s Hour, the long-running and popular magazine show. Although much modernized and expanded now, in the 1990s Broadcasting House still had the feel of the Art Deco architectural icon it then was. As we walked through the maze of corridors to the studio, Miep told me that the BBC, and the radio broadcasts from London they had listened to clandestinely, became their lifeline during those terrible war years. Being in that building was something very special for her. In the taxi on our way back she spoke about her memories of Anne, sitting at a desk in hiding writing her diary. One day Anne had become angry that Miep’s arrival had interrupted her train of thought and she shouted at her, ‘You know Miep I am writing my diary. And you’re in it!’ (Miep had understood this was not complimentary.) However, Anne did truly understand the risk their helpers were putting themselves through. In January 1944 she had written about the bravery of the Dutch Resistance:
It’s amazing how much these generous and unselfish people do, risking their own lives to help and save others. The best example of this is our own helpers, who have managed to pull us through so far and will hopefully bring us safely to shore, because otherwise they’ll find themselves sharing the fate of those they’re trying to protect. Never have they uttered a single word about the burden we must be, never have they complained that we’re too much trouble.
Miep also spoke to me at length about Edith Frank, and how worried and frightened Edith had been that there would be a terrible outcome. Many times as Miep had been leaving the hiding place Edith had followed her down the stairs as far as the exit concealed by the bookcase and asked her quietly to tell her ‘woman to woman’ what was really happening on the outside. Miep did. On other occasions the two women had sat on Auguste van Pels’s bed and Edith poured out her worries and concerns that they were not going to make it.
Anne’s impatience with her mother comes over strongly in her diary, similar I am sure to many private teenage diaries as adolescents are wrestling with their future independence and who they are going to be. Edith Frank-Hollander was the protective mother of two teenage girls, and she was also shut up for day after day with relative strangers she was forced to get along with. Only in her early forties at that time, the poor woman was probably having something of a nervous breakdown through fear.
Miep told me she had a special affection for Auguste van Pels, who was a sweet woman despite the unflattering description of her in Anne’s diary. Miep found Auguste to be stylish and fun and showed me the dress ring she had given Miep in gratitude for the help she had been giving her and her family. She told me she never took it off, so that she could constantly look at it and remember Auguste. Only recently it has been discovered that Mrs van Pels did not in fact die in Theresienstadt camp as had previously been thought – she was deliberately thrown under a train by Nazi guards en route to the camp and was crushed to death beneath its wheels.
Miep continued to correspond with children who wrote to her almost up to her death, and had a special relationship with St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Primary School in Highgate, north London, and their teacher Paul Sutton. Each year, over the course of several months, Paul would undertake a project on Anne Frank, to help the children deal with their concerns about their forthcoming transition to their much larger secondary school. The project involved art, poetry and prose, culminating in a public exhibition at the end of the school year and a visit to the Anne Frank House by the pupils. Over the course of several years Miep wrote to each new year-group to encourage their work and of course her letters were displayed too. Paul Sutton tragically died of a heart attack on his return from the annual school trip to Amsterdam in 2010.
I still treasure the letters Miep wrote to me, her distinctive signature remaining the same throughout the years. In 1999, she wrote to thank me for the birthday card I had sent her. To my enquiry as to whether she was still walking up her dangerously steep stairs in high heels, this 90-year-old lady responded, ‘I regret to disappoint you that I am no longer in high heels.’ Miep’s fondness for high heels was well known, after all it was she who had introduced a thrilled 14-year-old Anne Frank to wearing them.
In one letter dated November 2008, just fifteen months before the end of her very long life, Miep wrote to me excitedly having learnt that an Anne Frank Award for Moral Courage was to be presented in her honour. SHE (Miep!) considered it a great honour to have her name attached to an award sponsored by her friend, the Anne Frank Trust’s Life President Bee Klug. Miep was aware the award would be given to an exceptional candidate. She finished the letter with the words, ‘My dear Gillian, I wish you with my whole heart good health, true happiness and continued success.’
Actually the winner of the Anne Frank Award in honour of Miep Gies was supremely deserving. Her name was Nicole Dryburgh. A pretty dark-haired girl of 20, Nicole arrived at the House of Commons where the awards were taking place in a wheelchair and with many members of her proud family alongside. Nicole had been diagnosed with a spinal tumour at the age of 11, and had lost the use of her legs. Then, aged 13, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour and lost her sight. Nonetheless, determined to continue her studies, she achieved high marks in her GCSE exams at 16, especially in English, as like Anne Frank, Nicole had a dream of being a journalist and having a career as a writer. Nicole’s spirit was indomitable. She raised over £110,000 for two London hospitals, including by abseiling down the side of a tall building. She wrote two books: The Way I See It and Talk to the Hand. Less than a year after receiving
her Anne Frank Award, in May 2010, Nicole lost her long battle with cancer. In Nicole’s obituary, the Anne Frank/Miep Gies Award was cited as a special moment in her life.
As long as I knew Miep Gies she continued to carry a burden of guilt for not being able to save the members of the Frank and van Pels families and Fritz Pfeffer from their terrible fate. Reflecting on it, she would sigh, look down and shake her head. But what she did, and the constant state of peril she put herself in for over two years, should be considered the noblest and most courageous of human endeavours.
On one occasion I asked Miep why she had chosen to risk her life to help others. Her answer was simple: ‘Because Mr Frank had asked me to help.’ It’s a simplistic answer and I am sure did not reflect the moral dilemma she had to face when asked. Probably at the time she did not realize it would be for over two years. But her answer also demonstrated the enormous respect she had for Otto Frank, whom she continued to address as Mr Frank even when he came to live with Miep and her husband after the war.
I have been very privileged to meet other Holocaust-era rescuers. They all carry a humility and when offered any form of praise often give a discernible shrug of the shoulders as if to say ‘It was nothing. What else could I do?’ Sir Nicholas Winton was such a person. A British businessman who found himself in Nazi-occupied Prague, Winton single-handedly established an organization to help children from Jewish families at risk from the Nazis. He set up his office at a dining-room table in his hotel in Wenceslas Square. Through his intervention, no less than 669 mostly Jewish children were taken out of Prague on the Kindertransport trains, thus saving their lives.
Winton had kept his wartime exploits very much to himself and they were not publicly known about until February 1988. His exposure on the primetime Esther Ranzten TV show remains one of British popular broadcasting’s most memorable moments. Sitting in the front row of the audience Winton was unaware that he was seated next to Vera Gissing, one of the very children he had saved. The moment of that revelation was emotional enough and the tear he shed was visible. But then Esther ‘innocently’ asked if there happened to be any others in the audience that Nicky Winton had rescued. Slowly, almost row by row to prolong the televisual drama, over two dozen members of the audience rose from their seats. Hearing the movement behind him, Nicky stood up and looked round. To his stunned amazement the children he had helped on to trains were surrounding him, by that time all middle-aged men and women. As he sat down he took out a white handkerchief from his jacket pocket and his tears readily flowed.
As his fame deservedly grew and he was bestowed with many honours and awards, Sir Nicholas Winton retained his humility and mockingly dry sense of humour. I called him in late 2009 to invite him to be a guest of honour at the Anne Frank Trust’s annual fundraising lunch the following January. ‘Well my dear, in principle it’s a yes, but I suggest you call me again much nearer the event just to check I’m still here.’ Fortunately, he made it to the event. When asked on arrival at 10.00 a.m. if he would care for a mid-morning drink (we had coffee in mind) he insisted on a glass of bubbly. Sir Nicholas Winton lived to be 106.
In South Africa in 1994, I met Cor and Truus Grootendorst, a couple who had worked tirelessly in the Dutch Resistance and had saved 200 Jewish children by taking them from their desperate parents to live with Dutch families. As we sat in their sun-filled Cape Town flat they described dark days and even darker nights of fear. One of their missions had not ended well. When Truus had gone to collect two children from a young Jewish couple in danger, the mother had pleaded with her to let the family stay together for just one more night. Truus was fearful as she knew the Nazis were closing in with their search for Jews hiding in the area, but reluctantly agreed as the mother was so distraught at the thought of never seeing her children again. When Truus returned for the children before daybreak, to her horror the family had been found and taken away. I asked Truus if she was alarmed about her own safety, but she simply said, ‘No. But I regret to this day that I couldn’t save those children.’ To which I could only respond, ‘But Truus, you and Cor had saved 200 others.’
Sometimes Holocaust survivors themselves went on to become helpers in post-war events. One evening during my visit to Argentina in 2010 I gave a talk, with an interpreter alongside, to a gathering of community supporters of the Centro Ana Frank. A charming elderly woman was introduced to me as a Polish-born Holocaust survivor called Monica Davidowicz. I subsequently discovered that Monica had in turn hidden people during the ‘Dirty War’, and that several other Holocaust survivors had done the same.
In an article ‘We Are Stones: Anne Frank, the Diary and the Play’ published in October 2015, the Canadian educator Len Rudner referred to a study done by Samuel Oliner, a child survivor of the Holocaust.
He [Oliner] wanted to know how it was possible that in a Europe that was dominated by the Nazis, it was still possible for men and women to say ‘no’ to evil and stand up against the Nazis to help the victims. In his study, ‘The Altruistic Personality’, he found that the ‘helpers’ were individuals who were taught from a very early age that they were no different from anyone else. They were taught to look past external differences to see the common links that existed between city-dwellers and country-dwellers, between farmers and shopkeepers, between Jews and Gentiles. They were raised to ask questions and to think independently.
Rudner continued:
These were the characteristics of those men and women who saved the persecuted during the time of the Nazi horror. I suspect that they have existed in every age and in every time of terror.
The stories of rescuers fascinate me. You read of people who saved friends and lovers, but also those who saved complete strangers. You read about rescuers who saved individuals who they didn’t even like: ungrateful dependents who ignored rules of safety and exposed themselves and their protectors to detection and risk through thoughtlessness and plain stupidity. And yet the rescuers persevered. And when asked where they found the reservoirs of heroism to draw upon, they denied that they were heroes. And when asked why they did what they did, they often responded as if the question was too foolish to even answer.
As Anne Frank’s biographer Melissa Muller notes, ‘We know very little about what the helpers were feeling. They never liked to talk about themselves. On the one hand they did not want to portray themselves as heroes; they did what they did simply because they were who they were and could do no different.’
On the night Miep Gies died, 11 January 2010, by a strange coincidence Jon Blair’s Oscar-winning film Anne Frank Remembered was being rescreened on the BBC. After spending the evening preparing an obituary for The Independent newspaper, I settled down to watch the film and think about the woman whom I had been lucky enough to know and had just been attempting to describe in words. As the two-hour film closes, Miep stares directly into the camera and says in her broken English how important she finds it to speak to children: ‘Very interesting are the letters from the German children. They ask me everything, telling me that their father and grandfather didn’t tell me anything about the war, saying “that’s the past and it is over”. But that’s not true. The past is always with you your whole life and we must learn from that past.’
Chapter 14
Anne Frank goes into British Prisons
‘Here in the prison we need to look out for and remember the humanity in everyone we meet in order not to lose the humanity of our institution. That’s why we have had the Anne Frank exhibition here before, why we are so pleased it has been here this fortnight and why we look forward to its return to the prison once more in the future.’ Governor David Redhouse, Wormwood Scrubs Prison, London, December 2014
The Anne Frank exhibition has been touring British prisons since 2002, visiting at least ten establishments each year. Hundreds of serving prisoners have been trained to be Anne Frank exhibition guides and Holocaust survivors have received immense satisfaction from telling their stories within prison walls.
> All the Holocaust survivors who have worked with the Anne Frank Trust in prisons have felt it to be one of the most rewarding things they have done, and almost always ask to repeat the experience. When the prisoners see an elderly man or woman stand in front of them, declare in a genteel Continental accent that they were ‘once in prison too’, and then go on to tell their horrific story, the prisoners are given a new perspective on their own grievances against society.
It was the racist murder of a teenage prisoner that made the Anne Frank exhibition tour come about. In March 2000, 19-year-old Zahid Mubarek, born in London of Pakistani heritage, was murdered while he was sleeping by his cellmate Robert Stewart. Mubarek was a first-time prisoner being held in Feltham Young Offenders Institution in west London, and when he was killed he was just five hours from the end of a 90-day sentence for stealing a pack of razor blades worth £6. After the murder, Stewart etched a Nazi swastika on the wall of their cell with the heel of his shoe. Campaigners are still asking whether the teenage Mubarek’s placement in the same cramped cell as a known racist was accidental, negligent or, worse still, deliberate.
Later the same year, which had seen several other racist incidents in prisons, Sarah Payne, the Regional Manager of Thames Valley Prison Service, happened upon the Anne Frank travelling exhibition on display at Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard. Sarah contacted Nick Leader, the Governor of Reading Prison, as she knew there had also been incidents of racism at Reading, not only by inmates but by prison officers towards inmates. Sarah had coincidentally also encountered the Anne Frank Trust’s adviser Nic Careem at a government event, and he convinced her about the impact the Anne Frank exhibition could possibly have in prisons. All consequently fell into place for the first ever visit of an Anne Frank exhibition to a prison establishment in April 2002.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 22
