Without Miep, Anne would have been forgotten,
her frank voice lost.
From other sources we’d have learned how rotten
life was for Jews, the Holocaust
a story of six million who were sent
to die, not knowing those
who were like willows in the ice storm bent,
most broken. Anne Frank’s prose
provides for all these willows a memorial,
and though, just like the oak,
which stood unbent like monuments marmoreal
till in a storm it broke,
she too was broken, dying only weeks
before the liberation, we won’t cease
to marvel how the spirit always seeks
survival. Thanks, Miep Gies.
In an obituary of Miep Gies, Richard Goldstein wrote in the NYT, January 12, 2010:
Miep Gies, the last survivor among Anne Frank’s protectors and the woman who preserved the diary that endures as a testament to the human spirit in the face of unfathomable evil, died Monday night, the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam said. She was 100. The British Broadcasting Corporation said Mrs. Gies suffered a fall late last month and died at a nursing home. “I am not a hero,” Mrs. Gies wrote in her memoir, “Anne Frank Remembered,” published in 1987. “I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did and more — much more — during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always like yesterday in the heart of those of us who bear witness.”…..
….. Mrs. Gies remained largely anonymous until an American writer, Alison Leslie Gold, persuaded her to tell her story and worked with her on “Anne Frank Remembered.”
In her diary entry on May 8, 1944, Anne Frank wrote how “we are never far from Miep’s thoughts.” In her memoir, Mrs. Gies told of her emotions when she finally read the diary. She wrote: “The emptiness in my heart was eased. So much had been lost, but now Anne’s voice would never be lost. My young friend had left a remarkable legacy to the world. But always, every day of my life, I’ve wished that things had been different. That even had Anne’s diary been lost to the world, Anne and the others might somehow have been saved. Not a day goes by that I do not grieve for them.”
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
