The bill's sponsor, Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy, spoke in Congress on behalf of the resolution:
Why is it important to honor Miep Gies?
I recently visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. It is an overwhelming experience, and as we ponder the horror of Hitler's plan to eradicate the Jewish people, we ask ourselves: How could this have happened? How could so many stand by silently? How could so many actually participate?
So it is important, I think, to understand that there are some who spoke up, heroes like Miep Gies, and it is important to honor people like her, people who helped the Jews, who worked against the sea of hatred that had enveloped most of Europe at that time--people like Miep Gies, an ordinary woman, who did an extraordinary thing.
She was born to a German Catholic family in Austria on February 15, 1909. When she was 11, her family sent her to live with a foster family in the Netherlands to escape food shortages in postwar Austria. She worked as a servant, as a seamstress, as waitress. Then, in 1933, she took a job with an Amsterdam manufacturing company owned by Otto Frank, a German Jew, who left Frankfurt when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and when the organized attacks on the Jews began, including the boycott on
Jewish businesses.
Ms. Gies quickly became friends with the Frank family. On July 6, 1942, more than 2 years into the German occupation of the Netherlands, Otto Frank; his wife, Edith; and his daughters, Margot and Anne, went into hiding in a secret annex behind a bookshelf in Otto Frank's office. They were later joined by Hermann and Auguste Van Pels; their son, Peter; and Fritz Pfeffer.
For 2 more years, Miep Gies, along with her husband, Jan, and three other employees of Otto Frank, risked their lives to supply the eight people in hiding with food, clothing, with news from the outside, and with paper for Anne to write on.
As Anne noted in her diary, ``Miep has so much to carry; she looks like a pack mule. She goes forth nearly every day, scrounging for vegetables, and then bicycles back with her purchases in large shopping bags.''
Miep is also the one who brought five library books to Anne every Saturday. She did this during a time of war. It [Page: H675]
was a time of shortages, a time when getting food meant managing ration coupons. Despite their efforts, though, on August 4, 1944, the Gestapo raided the secret hiding place, and they captured the eight hideaways who were betrayed by an anonymous tip.
Miep Gies discovered the pages of the diary that Anne kept during her time in hiding, and Miep locked them in a desk drawer for safekeeping. When she learned that Margot and Anne had died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, she returned Anne's diary to Otto Frank, the only one of the eight to have survived the Holocaust.
As was noted, she passed away recently, on January 11, 2010, at the age of 100, but she kept alive a very important part of Holocaust history by preserving Anne's diary and by helping us to learn, to understand and to remember so it will not happen again.
Thanks to Miep Gies' bravery, Anne's recollections have been preserved for future generations. Miep later described her efforts to assist the eight people in hiding, saying, ``Of course, it's nice to be appreciated, but I only did my duty to my fellow man. I helped people in need. Anyone can do that, can't they?''
This understated appraisal of her heroic acts is just one example of her modesty and her integrity. We can learn much from Miep Gies, an ordinary woman, who showed extraordinary courage in the face of unspeakable peril during Nazi occupation and the Holocaust. She is a powerful symbol of resistance against oppression and injustice. She is an example of our human capacity to rise even to the most daunting of challenges.
I urge my colleagues to join me in recognizing this incredible woman's life and legacy.
You can see video of this speech, along with the rest of the text, here.
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