I posted this some years ago when Miep Gies died  at the age of 100. I have added the graphic and the video interview to remember an extraordinary woman, her legacy, and the life lesson her life communicates. – 1/19/2018

An office secretary in Amsterdam during the Nazi reign of terror, she was impressed to do her part to save the family of her boss and friend, a Jewish man named Otto.

For 25 months, she, her husband, and other employees assisted them with food and necessities. She could have been sent to a concentration camp for this effort.

Eventually, the family was discovered and arrested. Only Otto survived.

Gies went to the apartment where they had hidden to rescue the family's scattered notebooks and papers. Then she locked them in a drawer for her return after the war. Include among the papers were those of Otto's daughter.

Gies never read them. She felt that they were sacred and private. If she had, she said she would have had to destroy them because they would have implicated "helpers" whose lives would have been in danger.

After the war, Otto returned alone and stayed with the Gies family until 1952.

Her efforts later won her many accolades which she considered unfair. She felt others had done and risked far more. She said that if we believed that only extraordinary people responded courageously to their neighbor's needs in times of danger, no one would respond. To her, it was the natural thing to do.

She said that not a day went by in her life when she did not regret not being able to save Otto's family, especially their young daughter who died in the concentration camp at the age of 15.

Her name was Anne – Anne Frank.

Miep presented Otto his daughter's diary after his return.

It has been a treasure to the world of hope and goodwill. Without Miep Gies' courage and compassion, it would have been lost to the generations.

Gies was honored with the "Righteous Gentile" title by the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem.

She fell shortly before Christmas and sustained a neck injury which took her life last week.

I had never heard of Miep Gie, but without her, I would have never heard of Anne Frank or read "The Diary of Ann Frank."

God grant us more ordinary people who are willing to extend a hand to their neighbors in ways that may seem extraordinary but become so commonplace as to be considered ordinary.

Gies died in 2010