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Eureka! Classics | If it hadn’t been for Miep Gies The Diary of Anne Frank would have been lost. She found it on the floor of the hiding place after Anne’s arrest, and following the war she gave it to Otto Frank who was the only member of the family to survive Auschwitz.

Anne Frank called the people who helped her while she was hiding from the Nazis, ‘the helpers’. Of the four helpers, Miep Gies is the only one still living.

She met Anne Frank in 1933 when Anne’s father Otto Frank hired her as a secretary for his Opekta business. Through the years she watched Anne grow up. After Germany occupied the Netherlands, Otto Frank was forced by the anti-semetic degrees to turn over his Opekta business to his employees. When the deportation of the Jews began in 1942, he and his family along with four other Jews went into hiding in the back part of the building which housed his company. His employees helped him to do this.

Now, more than 50 years after Anne Franks arrest, Miep Gies once again walks through the building where she used to work. She sees the bookcase that hid the entrance of the secret annexe.

Wandering through the hiding place, that was refurnished accurately for this occasion, her memories of Anne Frank come to life. Miep tells of how Anne always kept on asking about what was happening outside and of the tension inside the hiding place. She recalls how one day she saw Anne writing in her diary and then how everything ended with the arrest of the eight people in hiding.

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Bonus Extra: The Short Life of Anne Frank narrated by Jeremy Irons