An "Ordinary" Heroine
Miep Gies, the woman who found Anne Frank's diary and saved it, has died at age 100. She was in her early thirties when the Nazis first came to Holland. Her employer, Otto Frank, had moved his family to Amsterdam to escape the increasing virulence of the Nazi regime in their native Germany. When the Nazis came to the place the Franks had hoped would be a haven, there was no way to run again. So the four of them, plus another small family and a single man - eight people in all - hid for a bit over two years, helped by Miep and her husband Jan and a few others. Even after their arrest, she risked going to the German police and trying to bribe them into letting the Franks go. Her courage was almost incomprehensible from my living room in the safety of 21st century Indiana.
I've been trying for the past several hours to think of something appropriate to say about her, something of what she taught simply by the way she lived her life, but there is too much there. That there is light, even in the deepest darkness. The greatness of spirit that an ordinary person is capable of, when the need arises. That heroism isn't only in the grand gestures, but in the quiet, day in and day out actions of anyone who tries to do what is right even when it could cost them everything. She insisted that she was not a heroine, because, she said, she did not want children to think that it required someone special to do what was right. "Who is a hero?" she asked. "I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary."
She was indeed a housewife and secretary, and a mother. But it was in her very "ordinariness", in being the sort of person everyone knows, that she was most extraordinary.
In what you did, in what you said, in a girl's writings carefully preserved, in the stories you told and by the example you set, you changed the world, Miep Gies. And in so doing, you blessed us all.
I've been trying for the past several hours to think of something appropriate to say about her, something of what she taught simply by the way she lived her life, but there is too much there. That there is light, even in the deepest darkness. The greatness of spirit that an ordinary person is capable of, when the need arises. That heroism isn't only in the grand gestures, but in the quiet, day in and day out actions of anyone who tries to do what is right even when it could cost them everything. She insisted that she was not a heroine, because, she said, she did not want children to think that it required someone special to do what was right. "Who is a hero?" she asked. "I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary."
She was indeed a housewife and secretary, and a mother. But it was in her very "ordinariness", in being the sort of person everyone knows, that she was most extraordinary.
In what you did, in what you said, in a girl's writings carefully preserved, in the stories you told and by the example you set, you changed the world, Miep Gies. And in so doing, you blessed us all.