A woman who hid Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis in Amsterdam during WWII and found her diaries, has died at the age of 100, Israeli Haaretz newspaper said on Tuesday.
Miep Gies was the last survivor of a non-Jewish group that hid Frank's German Jewish family at a secret warehouse annex between July 1942 and August 1944, before the building was raided by the Nazi SS.
The Frank family was betrayed and seized by Nazis on August 4, 1944. Miep Gies found Anne's diary and kept it for many years.
"More than 20,000 Dutch people helped to hide Jews and others in need of hiding during those years," Gies wrote in the prologue to her book, Anne Frank Remembered, first published in 1987. "I was only willing to do what was asked of me and what seemed necessary at the time."
Anne died of typhoid at the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in March 1945.
Her father, Otto, was the only survivor of the family. When he returned to Amsterdam after the war, Geis gave him the diary. He pursued the publication of his daughter's diary which told the whole world about its author. The diary is now translated into more than 70 languages.
Russian Tanya Savicheva, 12, began to write a diary a bit earlier than Anne Frank, a victim of the Holocaust. The girls were almost of the same age, and both wrote about the horrors of Nazism, and never lived to see the victory: Tanya died in July 1944.
Savicheva's diary was never published as it contained only seven bloodcurdling notes about the death of her large family in besieged Leningrad. The small notebook was presented during the Nuremberg Trials as a document condemning Nazism.
MOSCOW, January 12 (RIA Novosti)
