Jan Gies - Life

Life

Jan Gies (né Henk van Santen) was born and raised in Amsterdam's south side. He met his future wife, Miep Gies, in 1933 when he was a bookkeeper and she an office worker at a local textile company. It was not until after they'd gone their separate ways - Jan into the Dutch Social Services and Miep to Otto Frank's company Opekta - that they met each other again socially in 1936. They married in Amsterdam on 16 July 1941, when Miep was threatened with deportation back to Vienna after she refused to join a Nazi women's group. Their wedding was attended by Otto and Anne Frank, Hermann van Pels and his wife, and Miep's colleagues Victor Kugler, Bep Voskuijl and Johannes Kleiman. Later that year, Gies was appointed the nominal director of Otto Frank's company after he was forced to resign from the board under the newly introduced Nazi laws which forbade Jews to hold directorships, and from then on, the company traded under the name Gies & Co.

As the persecution of Amsterdam's Jewish population intensified he dedicated himself to assisting Jews and others escape by obtaining illegal ration cards for food, finding them hiding places, and securing British newspapers free from Nazi propaganda. Gies aided the Frank family's escape to their hiding place at the Gies & Co premises at 263 Prinsengracht. He visited frequently during their two year confinement, and with his wife spent a night in the secret annex to experience the terror there for themselves.

In addition to their concealment of the Frank and van Pels families and of Fritz Pfeffer at the Prinsengracht, Miep and Jan also took in a student, who had refused to sign a Nazi oath. Following the arrest and deportation of the hidden families in August 1944, Miep rescued the diaries and other manuscripts of Anne Frank from the hiding place before it was ransacked by the Dutch secret police. Of the eight people she and Jan had assisted to hide, Otto Frank was the sole survivor Upon Frank's return to Amsterdam in June 1945 he moved in with them, and stayed with them for seven years before he emigrated to Switzerland to be close to his mother.

After the publication of Anne Frank's diary, under the title Het Achterhuis (The Backhouse; often translated as The Secret Annex) in 1947, Jan and Miep found themselves the subjects of media attention, particularly after the diary was translated into English as The Diary of a Young Girl and adapted for the stage and screen. They attended memorial ceremonies and gave lectures about Anne Frank and the importance of resisting fascism.