People Associated With Anne Frank - The Helpers

The Helpers

• Miep Gies, saved Anne Frank's diary without reading it. She later said that if she had read it, she would have needed to destroy it, as it contained a great deal of incriminating information (such as the names of all of the annex helpers). She and her husband, Jan, took Otto Frank into their home, where he lived from 1945 (after his liberation from Auschwitz concentration camp) until 1952. In 1994, she received the "Order of Merit" of the Federal Republic of Germany, and in 1995 received the highest honor from the Yad Vashem, the Righteous Among the Nations. She was appointed a "Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau" by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. In 1996, she shared an Academy Award with Jon Blair for their documentary Anne Frank Remembered, based largely on her book of the same title. She also wrote the afterword for the Melissa Müller biography of Anne Frank. She stated that every year she continued to spend the entire day of 4 August in mourning, the date those in the Annex were arrested. Miep Gies died on 11 January 2010, following a short illness, at the age of 100.

• Jan Gies (Miep's husband) was a social worker, and was also, for part of the war, a member of the Dutch Underground and thus was able to procure things for the people in the annex that would have been almost impossible to obtain any other way. Jan died of complications from diabetes on 26 January 1993 in Amsterdam. He and Miep had been married for 51 years.

• Johannes Kleiman spent about six weeks in a work camp after his arrest, and was released after intervention from the Red Cross because of his fragile health. He returned to Opekta and took over the firm when Otto Frank moved to Basel in 1952. He died at his office desk of a stroke in 1959, aged sixty-three.

• Victor Kugler spent seven months in various work camps and escaped in March 1945, when the prisoner march he was on that day was strafed by British Spitfires. Working his way back to his hometown of Hilversum on foot and by bicycle, he remained in hiding there until liberated by Canadian troops a few weeks later. After his wife died, he emigrated to Canada in 1955 (where several of his relatives already lived) and resided in Toronto. He received the "Medal of the Righteous" from Yad Vashem Memorial, with a tree planted in his honour on the Boulevard of the Righteous Among the Nations in 1973. He died on 16 December 1981 in Toronto, after a long illness, at the age of eighty-one.

• Bep Voskuijl, like her colleagues, was instructed to stay in the office on the day the Franks were forced from their hiding place, but in the confusion that followed Bep managed to escape with a few documents which would have incriminated their black market contacts. Bep and Miep found Anne's diaries and papers after the eight prisoners, together with Kugler and Kleiman, had been arrested and removed from the building. Bep left Opekta shortly after the war and married in 1946. While she did grant an interview to a Dutch magazine some years after the war, she mostly shunned publicity. However, Bep kept her own scrapbook of Anne-related articles throughout her life. Bep and her husband had four children, the last a daughter whom she named "Anne Marie", in honor of Anne. She died in Amsterdam on 6 May 1983.

• Johannes Hendrik Voskuijl (Bep's father) was lauded constantly by the eight in hiding as a tremendous help with all matters during their early days in the achterhuis. However, Anne often mentioned his ill health in her diary, and he became incapacitated after a diagnosis of abdominal cancer. He died of the disease in late November, 1945.