Meet Miep: The woman who safeguarded Anne Frank's Diary

"I don't like being called a hero because no one should ever think you have to be special to help others. Even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room," said Miep Gies, an ordinary woman who resisted the Nazis during the World War II.   

Miep Gies was one of the most prominent people in the history of the Holocaust as one who safeguarded Anne Frank's writings through the end of the war in May 1945.

One summer day, Anne's father, Otto Frank, returned home from the camp in Auschwitz. He was the only survivor of the eight Jews, including his wife Edith and two daughters Margot and Anne, who lived together in the "Secret Annex" of an Amsterdam office building. Shortly after Otto learned of his daughters' deaths, Miep handed him something, saying, "Here is … Anne's legacy to you."

She had saved one of the most famous accounts of the Holocaust: Anne Frank's diary.

On 4 August, 1944, Miep's battle only grew more tragic as the SS arrested Anne and her family, shoved them in a truck to be thrown into camps. Karl Josef Silberbauer was part of the Gestapo team that used a tip-off to track down the Franks.

In that moment, Miep, as helpless and powerless as she'd felt, did the only thing she could. She snuck back into the annex to see what had been left behind – a diary, books and loose handwritten papers that she tucked away in a drawer and pledged to "keep everything safely for Anne until she came back," Miep recalled in her autobiography.

Unfortunately, Anne never did make it back home. Sometime in 1945, at the age of 15, she died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Her diary, which survived the war, became one of the most well-known memoirs of the persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany.

The greatest heroism often resides in the actions of ordinary people.

Miep deserves and has been showered with an overwhelming amount of credit for bringing Anne's diary to a global audience.

Without her intervention, the young writer's words—which "gave a child's face to the incomprehensible truths of the Holocaust," according to National Geographic's Erin Blakemore—might never have reached the wider world.

A Small Light

Miep went on to live 100 years. She travelled widely, sharing Anne's story with students and the public.

But her legacy was upheld 13 years after her passing in an eight-part miniseries from National Geographic, streaming on Hulu and Disney+, that builds steadily, in a fashion that's ultimately stirring and heart breaking.

The biographical account, "A Small Light," inspired by her famous words, tells the story of Anne Frank through the lenses of Miep, played by Bel Powley, her husband, Jan Gies, played by Joe Cole, and their involvement in Dutch resistance efforts during the war.  

The show was shot in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam and Harlem, and Prague, where the interior scenes were filmed in a three-story replica of Otto Frank's Amsterdam office, where the annex was hidden behind a bookcase. The original building, on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, is now the Anne Frank House.

Its showrunners Joan Rater and Tony Phelan visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Walking around the museum and listening to tour guides, they learned that many people don't really know the story of the Frank family anymore, let alone the story of the people who helped them, Rater and Phelan said in an interview, reports the New York Times.

Miep, who wasn't Jewish, was trying to dodge a Nazi checkpoint in the first episode which takes you back to 1934. In the opening scenes, Miep was seen desperately looking for a job for fear she'd be married off to her adopted brother if she could not find the means to support herself. She then finds employment with Otto Frank, played by Liev Schreiber. She was portrayed as a modern young woman living life carefree, meeting friends and going out dancing, until life took a darker turn.

The show "is about your personal dynamics that are interrupted by the war," said the actor playing Otto, Schreiber, who recently spent time in Ukraine raising money for humanitarian aid. "That's part of what I saw in Ukraine. These people's lives have been interrupted and they try to continue."

In the show, we saw nurses helped save babies from being killed by the Nazis. One memorable scene showed how nurses swapped babies for dolls, telling Jewish mothers to lose the dolls on their way to concentration camps.

The heart of what the show brought to the fore was when in 1942, Otto Frank asked Miep to help hide him and his family, Miep did not even bat an eyelid before saying yes.

"She had no idea what she was saying yes to," the show runners said. "And then she had to keep saying yes for two years."

While the story of Anne Frank and what happened to her is well known, Miep largely stayed out of the limelight. She published a memoir, "Anne Frank Remembered," in 1987 and was involved with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, but much of her story stayed private.