Anne Frank

The reluctant hero, who ensured that the diary of Anne Frank did not fall into the hands of Nazis after the 14-year-old's arrest, has is died. She was 100.

Gies was among a group of Dutch citizens who hid the Frank family of four and four other people in a secret annex in Amsterdam, Netherlands, during World War II, according to her official Web site, which announced her death Monday. The family stayed in the secret room from July 1942 until August 4, 1944, when they were arrested by Gestapo and Dutch police after being betrayed by an informant.

When Gies and a friend were left behind, she picked up Anne's papers from the floor, kept them in a desk drawer and gave them to Anne's father, Otto, after the war. Anne died in a concentration camp in 1945. Her father published her diary, titled "The Secret Annex," in 1947. It was released in America in 1952.



Despite the extreme hardship she endured during the German occupation, Gies never embraced the label of a hero. "More than 20,000 Dutch people helped to hide Jews and others in need of hiding during those years. I willingly did what I could to help. My husband did as well. It was not enough," she says in the prologue to her memoirs, "Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family."

In her diary, Anne Frank wrote, "In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death."