A Small Light. (D-Day)

Maybe it was because my parents met because of the war. (My father spent a couple of his Navy years stationed at Navy Pier in Chicago, which is where he met my Chicago-girl mother. And where I am, in fact, visiting today.)

Maybe it was the war's proximity to my own arrival on earth. As a child, it did seem way far in the past, but I was born just 4 years and change after WWII ended.

Maybe it was all those mostly god-awful black & white war movies I watched on Boston Movietime.

Whatever the reason, I've always been interested in World War II, especially the war in Europe. And the Holocaust. Both of which I've read extensively about, from childhood, through my school days, through my entire adult life. I've been to Dachau. Auschwitz. The Anne Frank House.

And of course I read The Diary of Anne Frank. So of course I knew about Miep Gies, the young Dutch woman who helped hide the Frank family from the Nazis. Who helped keep safe the Franks and the other Jews that were being sheltered in the building occupied by Opekta, a pectin (jam making ingredient) distributor. The company, which had been managed by Anne's father Otto, was located at Prinsengracht, now home of the Anne Frank House. Miep Gies was a secretary/office manager for Opekta.

Miep's story was recently recounted in A Small Light, a series shown on National Geographic.

While, like everyone else in the world, I knew the elements of the story, I was still gripped by it. At times, I was so tense, I could barely watch it. The day the Gestapo raided the Secret Annex and rounded up the Frank family and the other inhabitants. The day Miep went to Nazi headquarters and tried to ransom the Franks and others (the VanPels family and Dr. Pfeffer) who were still being held for transport. The day Otto came home from the war. The day he learned that neither of his daughters had survived. 

Miep did more than help the Jews in the Annex. She and her husband, who was a member of the Dutch Resistance, helped save other Jews, including some children they found hiding places for in the country.

It was all so heartbreaking, leavened by a few moments of joy in Miep's personal life, and in the Annex. 

One of those moments of joy was the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944.

By then, the Franks had been in hiding for nearly two years. But as they listened in on the great war news on their illegal radio, they could see that the end was in view. Any time now, the Allies would be in Amsterdam. The Germans would be gone. Anne Frank would be able to lead a normal teenage life, writing in her diary about schoolmates and beaux. About tennis games and the lack of chocolate in the deprived post-war period.

Miep and her husband would get on with their lives.

Instead...

Well, we all know the instead.

In August 1944, the Annex was raided. Of the eight Jews sheltered there, Otto Frank was the sole survivor. Anne and her sister Margot almost made it, but died in early 1945. Equally tragically, Peter Van Pels, the other teenaged occupant of the Annex, died just as the war ended in May 1945.

The title of A Small Light was taken from the words Miep Gies (who lived to be 100) used to end her presentations:

I don't like being called a hero because no one should ever think you have to be special to help others. Even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room.

I often wonder what I would have done.

Would I have consorted with Nazis? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have.

But would I have done anything other than passively not be a Nazi? What if I'd worked in a government office keeping data on who and where the Dutch Jews were? Would I have quit in disgust? Gone along? Actively resisted and tried to help people escape?

Would I have helped a Jewish friend who asked for help? I like to think so. What about a random Jew I didn't know? What would I have done then? Risked my neck (and the necks of my family) for a stranger? Maybe. But maybe not. (From this vantage point, knowing what I know now about the treatment of those who helped Jews out, I'm thinking probably not. But I was less of a scaredy-cat when I was in my twenties, wouldn't have yet known of the full horrors, and if people I loved and trusted were involved in the Resistance, I might not have been an initiator, but I might have gotten involved.)

Miep wasn't arrested for her role in helping the Franks et al. She had been born in Vienna and, as a sickly child in war-torn Austria after the first world war, had been sent to live with a family in Holland, which pretty much adopted her. She recognized the Viennese accent of the Nazi who helped conduct the raid. She spoke to him in German, told him she was from Vienna, and he let her go, telling the other raiders that she knew nothing.

So she got off, which didn't keep her from making a last ditch effort to bribe the Germans to release the families she'd help hide. Amazingly, after being relieved of the cash in her pocketbook, Miep was just kicked to the curb and not herself arrested. 

Thus go the fortunes of war.

Anyway, today I'm thinking of those brave men who landed in Normandy on D-Day. And of brave Miep Gies, who was so very willing to "turn on a small light in a dark room."

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On a more joyous note, this is a picture of Miep Gies and her husband Hans, with their baby son, taken in 1951. Sitting at Miep's shoulder is Otto Frank, who remained fast friends with Miep and Hans, and who lived with the Gies family for many years after the war. It was Miep, by the way, who - along with Bep, the other Opekta secretary - saved Anne's diary and hid it. They had hoped to return it to her after the war but, instead, gave it to Otto. The rest is history...