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Diary to Miep Gies and Anne Frank

Stories and News No. 87


The Story:

January 12, 2010

Dear diary,
Yesterday Miep Gies, the woman who tried to protect Anne Frank and saved her diary, died.
She was 100 years old.




Miep, or Hermine Santrouschitz, was born in 1909 in Vienna, Austria.
Just eleven, due to lack of food, she moved with her family to Leiden, a city of the Netherlands and two years later they went in Amsterdam.
It was there that she had an encounter that would mark his whole life.
A simple encounter as it could happen every day, even today.
Otto Frank was a German businessman of Jewish origin and had a factory that sold compounds for the production of jams.
Miep was looking for a job and Otto employed her.
The girl was smart and she quickly became a manager.
So far so normal, except that she became also a friend of Otto’s family.
The friendship nurtured affection, affection increased mutual understanding and mutual understanding is notoriously unpredictable.
In fact, just at the home of Frank, Miep met her husband Jan and they married in 1941.
In that year the Second World War shouted in the ears and the hearts of all and they knew how precious each gift of life, any never granted luck and every feeling to lean on in times of need were.
This was the reason whay, when the hunt for Jews broke out in their own country, Miep and her husband looked in their eyes and at that moment realized that they had already decided.
They would have helped Frank family.
They would have protected them at the cost of their own lives.
All Franks: Otto, his wife Edith and their daughters, Margot and Anne, known worldwide as Anne Frank.
Why did they do?
And why so many were indifferent?
In those years, millions of people have been abused, tortured and killed.
This is true even today.
In many, too many parts of the world, much closer to our home than we can hope for, also now, most of us are witness of the pain of the others, remaining apathetic.
We are moved in front of touching films, we send a solidarity sms to important causes, and we all feel to be on the good side because we are voting the good people, not the others.
Yet Miep and Jan Gies chose not to remain mere spectators and tried to save Anne Frank and her family.
Why?
Maybe because it was the right thing to do.
Perhaps because they realized that remaining helpless in front of the martyrdom of their fellow men means to be guiltier of the torturers.
Surely because they knew that to be born Jews, Roma, immigrants or gays is just by chance.
Life itself is made of a modicum of certainty and an ocean of unpredictability, which in a fleeting moment can take away the good fortune and erase every privilege.
And, as often happens, just at that moment we understand the meaning of everything.
However, I am happy to know that in the world there are people like Miep and Jan Gies, women and men who do not need to wait until the wheel turns to figure out what to be human means...


Stories and news: “invented” Stories, fruit of my imagination, inspired by “true” media News.

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