Tuesday, January 12, 2010

The importance of Miep Gies


Watching television news Monday provided a clear look at what our society has become...and why it is important to maintain newspapers.

The stories that were covered offered a wide range of interesting, though not particularly important events:

-Former St. Louis Cardinal first baseman Mark McGwire finally admitted what nearly everyone believed from the beginning, that he used steroids (though his claim that he could have hit 70 home runs in 1998 even without the chemical help was a bit hard to take).

-Former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been hired as a contributor to Fox News (interesting, but not much of a surprise).

-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, with his comments about President Obama lacking a "negro dialect" remained under fire.

-NBC's in-house drama, trying to juggle the volatile situation with Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, and Jimmy Fallon continues with no resolution in sight.

-Simon Cowell announced he will bow out after the current season of American Idol.

While all of these stories were covered extensively in newspapers, as well as on the cable television news shows, there was one story, about the death of a woman whose contributions to society were probably more valuable than those of all of the aforementioned celebrities combined, which was almost exclusively relegated to newspapers.

It was announced Monday that Miep Gies died in a Netherlands nursing home after suffering from a fall a few days before Christmas. She was 100.

The name Meep Gies may not ring a bell with you, but Miep Gies was one of a small group that hid eight Jews from the Nazis for slightly more than two years, an act which could have cost her her life. And when the Gestapo finally discovered the eight, it was Meep Gies who managed to preserve the writings of the youngest of the eight- Anne Frank.

Her first thought, she always said, was to hold on to the diary to give it back to Anne after the war. That did not come to pass, as Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Eventually, Miep Gies presented the papers to Anne's father, Otto Frank, and then she helped him put them into the form that has become known to generation after generation for more than six decades, continuing to offer an indictment of the Holocaust, as well as to deliver a message of hope.

In a 1998 interview, Miep Gies said she did not consider the risks she took to protect the Frank family and the others in that annex to be heroic. "They were powerless, they didn't know where to turn. We did our duty as human beings: helping people in need."

Though it would have been nice to have seen more television time devoted to Miep Gies and her continuing contributions to the world, it was not surprising that the airwaves were filled with Sarah Palin, Mark McGwire, Harry Reid, Simon Cowell, Jay Leno, and Conan O'Brien. That left it for newspapers to pick up the slack and most of the ones I read this morning featured stories on Miep Gies, whose gift to posterity will be recalled long after the names mentioned above are just dim memories.

17 comments:

Dubious said...

The Diary of Ann Frank is one of the most famous forgeries in existence. After the war, her father, one of millions of Holocaust survivors, undertook to write up what he thought would be profitable. Vast portions of the 'diary' were written in ball-point pen, the first which was available after 1951. Ann Frank's father, Otto, after suspicions were raised, refused to allow scholars to inspect the alleged diary that he had allegedly 'found'.

So to anyone but the professionally credulous,or those who have something to gain from it, this Diary of Anne Frank is a fraud. What was probably a few pages of diary by a child have been expanded into a polemic against the Nazis, who were quite aware of whom had betrayed them in the First World War, brought about the injustices of the Versailles Treaty, and the puppet Weimar Republic, which brought about the perceived need for a savior in the form of Adolf Hitler, whom most Germans loved.

And the silly woman who harbored Jews in her home is no more to be admired than some silly senile old cat lady hiding a score of diseased fleabags from the animal control officer. Southpark did a parody of this several years ago. Yet predictably Turner has nothing better to do than to bemoan the end of idiot lie-papers which used to publish reams of liberal polemic drivel which usually bored the proles to tears and amused and enraged white men to where they refused to pay for this vicious silliness any more.

No wonder the mass media, especially the lie-papers, is on the ropes. Good riddance to dog-awful lying rubbish.

Anonymous said...

What on earth is dubious talking about???

Meep was a heorine who MUST be recognised for the work that she did

I have read the book and saw the film, and was heartbroken on both occasions,

Dubious should be locked up and the key thrown away

Anonymous said...

Typical Southwest Missouri hatred by Dubious.

Go play with your guns, freak.

Ryan said...

I want to know this. Why didn't the Gestapo haul Miep Gies off along with her husband when they came for the Frank family?

Hadding said...

Only Jews not born in conquered western Europe were deported. The Frank family was not deported because they were Jews. They were deported because they were immigrant Jews. Many Jews born in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands lived through the German occupation without being disturbed. I suspect that Miep Gies was one of them.

There's a lot of gratuitous drama in the way Miep Gies tells the story. She says that the Franks were sent off to a "death camp": how is that credible or even relevant when Otto Frank survived at the "death camp" of Auschwitz and Anne Frank, being well enough to travel, was evacuated thence only to die of typhus (not gas) at Bergen-Belsen? This is not rational. Miep Gies seems to have been working with Otto Frank to hype the story.

The Old Man said...

Part of the so-called Diary of Anne Frank was written in ball point pen, which had not yet been invented in the 1940s. The forgery appears to have been carried out with the collusion of Otto Frank, who sued his ghost writer in the 1950s over a royalty dispute. All of this is why the original document is so carefully hidden away from prying eyes in a safe deposit box in Israel, where historians and scholars have been repeatedly denied access.

Randy said...

I am curious as to just how many different names Martin Lindstedt can come up with to spread misinformation.

. said...

We are tired of this Anne frank lie shoved down our throats for so many years (me, only heard this since the 1980s, and boy was I mad when learned how I had been lied to by jews and the educational system!)

Look at the evidence why we don't believe it.

If you still continue, then it's obvious you are doing it for an evil agenda.

Uncle Julius said...

"The Diarrhea of Anne Frank" is a wonderful work of fiction. Well, ok...it's not really wonderful, but that it's definitely a piece of fiction was first revealed in 1959 when a Swedish journal reported that a jewish novelist named Meyer Levin was suing Otto Frank (Anne's father) over nonpayment for the dialogue Levin had written for the "diary". It's no wonder that any question of the "official facts" about the Holoco$t is a jailable offense throughout Europe and Canada. Unlike fabrications, REAL history doesn't need to be enforced at the point of a gun!

T said...

You're all joking, right? A forgery? A work of fiction? You all should be ashamed of yourselves. There were many Jews in hiding during the Holocaust and many non-Jews that were willing to help them. If any of you have even read Anne Franks diary, you wouldn't question its authentensity. Instead, you sit at home and agree with protestors that protest subjects you know nothing about, just so that you can say you're diffferent. Congratulations. You're different, and completely wrong. Miep Gies courage is inspirational. Americans today could learn a lot from her.

Anonymous said...

You stay classy, Four States.

Randy Turner is to teaching what he used to be to journalism said...

Looks like you must be a rather poor school teacher since you cannot detect the difference between all them different posters and their styles. Some are highly educated. Some have had the misfortune of being taught by a sorry excuse of a public school with their teachers like yourself.

What sort of school teacher are you, anyway, Turner? Are you filling up them kiddies' heads full of tripe so much that they end up like little brainwashed drones turning in the exact same papers? So alike that you can't tell any difference in what they write? Or do you simply mark down for punishment by low-grading those independent young minds who are not buying into your liberal garbage?

The 'problem' is that this Anne Frank silliness has become as suspect as the atrocity stories of Nazis turning jews into lampshades or six million lies or whatever. Sort of hard to maintain the wartime fiction that millions of jews were killed in a Holocaust when so many of them survived these 'death camps' like Bergen-Belsen in order to live to sell another Holocaust memoir which later turns out to be fraudulent. Most of these Holocaust stories have in the fullness of time been revealed to be forgeries made so that jews could extort the Germans, then the English, American, and now Swiss taxpayers for causing something which didn't really happen like it did as the jews claim. Yes, jews were hated in Nazi Germany for what they had done to the Germans in the First World War and for what the Russian jew bolsheviks did to the ethnic Russians and Ukranians by starving them to death and putting them in gulags and murdering them. Joseph Stalin killed far more Russian Arny colonels and generals that the entire German Army did in WW2. But merely because the 'Diary of Anne Frank' is a hoary old forgery doesn't make it sacred, especially given that so many of these Holocaust whoppers have failed the test of time and second scrutiny.

For example, Russian jew emigres to Israel only get half the 4500 sheckles due them per year as 'Leningrad Siege' Holocaust survivors if they are over fifty and under 65 years old, and thus not even born during the German siege of Leningrad from 1941-44. Yet the German people still are paying half-price Holocaust reparations for something which didn't even happen to those jews not even born but who claim as a sort of birthright reaping the benefits from the Holocau$t Industry.

Even some jews like Finklestein are urging other jews to stop poisoning the well of civil discourse by these fraudulent reparations. This is especially the case given that so many American and English taxpayers have lost their homes and jobs thanks to the rapacity of bankster jews like Goldman Sachs. There is not only likely to be plenty of compassion fatigue, but also a backlash which might well lead to a real Holocaust if fools like yourself don't exhibit, if not shame, but good sense.

But then again, you don't seem to be much of a real teacher, Turner, but rather a sort of wannabe brain-washing drone, who when washed out of the newspaper business by your lies, decided to find a more innocent, vulnerable, and captive audience to peddle the politically correct garbage that their parents rejected.

Hadding said...

What "The Old Man" says there is not entirely correct. The dispute was with a playwright over a dramatic adaptation of the diary. It was not a suit between Otto Frank and his ghostwriter.

The point about ballpoint pen is a little overplayed. There are marginal notes and I think an appendix written in ballpoint ink. The really strange thing is that there are two versions of the diary. Who rewrites a diary?

Anonymous said...

After reading most of the comments on here, I am sick to my stomach. I'm only glad that most of them represent only a slim, psychotic minority. The amount of hate and fear that people create in themselves is just distrubing. The one's that could so ruthlessly rip about The Diary of Anne Frank and the history of the holocaust must be very unhappy and bitter people. Happy, well-adjusted people spend their time in much better ways.

Ryan said...

"If any of you have even read Anne Franks diary, you wouldn't question its authentensity."

I've not only had the misfortune to sit through a high school class where the play version of this book was read, but I have a copy I picked up off the high school floor where someone had discarded it at the closing of the school year.

I'm not questioning that a dairy existed, but I do find it funny that this woman didn't get sent to the camps with the Frank family. We all know according to what passes as history today that the Nazis killed everyone when it came to the Jews. No, with a number of claims about the "holocaust" being shown the be false like that woman's claim to have been raised by wolves or the phony story about soap and other assorted nonsense, I have six million reasons to be suspicious. For a small group of people there is too much to gain in terms of white guilt and monetary gain through nonstop propaganda.

By the way, I also wonder if the Gestapo confiscated the Bic pen used to edit the book?

David Irving says: said...

David Irving comment:

January 12, 2010 (Tuesday)
Windsor (England)

UP EARLY, as Radio New Zealand phones; they want to interview me at six-thirty this evening about the news that Mrs Miep Gies, who sheltered Anne Frank in Amsterdam has died aged one hundred.

Is there no end to these stories? Eventually they must surely peter out. I tell the radio station routinely that the Anne Frank tragedy goes a long way to confirming what revisionist historians like myself have always said about Auschwitz. She was in that camp - quite wrongly - with her father Otto and sister Margot; but all survived Auschwitz, although they were Jews and unemployable - the girls too young, the father too sick to work. (They were held for six months, about half as long as the Austrians imprisoned me in solitary confinement 2005-6 for a lecture I gave in 1989).

That all survived Auschwitz alone calls one of the camp legends into question. Otto was looked after by SS doctors in the camp hospital and survived, opting to stay there until the camp was overrun by the Red Army in January 1945; his daughters Anne and Margot had already been evacuated in October 1944 to Bergen-Belsen -- as were thousands of other Jews, which rather negates their "Nazi genocide" legend -- and there they succumbed to typhus (which epidemic must be laid at least partly at the door of the Allied bombers and the Polish secret underground) in March 1945.

Somebody once sent me a list of all the teenage girls called "Ann" who had been burned alive during one British air raid on Würzburg in March 1945 - there were 170 of them. "I wonder if any of them wrote a diary?" he asked.

I mention to the New Zealanders that I had corresponded with Otto in the 1970s about the authenticity of his daughter's diaries, and that the German criminal-forensics agency (Bundeskriminalamt) sent a team to Switzerland to test the diaries' pages armed with a court order; they found some pages written in ball-point pen, perhaps by Otto himself, who had torn out passages where she had written caustic remarks about her parents.

Now a billion-dollar industry swirls around the wretched girl, built up partly by her late father in Switzerland, and partly by the house owners in Amsterdam, each at each other's throats.

At least poor Bente is no longer hanging around, ready to snatch the phone out of my hand when Radio NZ phones!

http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/Irving/RadDi/2010/120110.html

Anonymous said...

Dandy Randy not all of us Ebil Nazis live in Southwest Missouri nor are we all named Martin Lindstedt. Some of us reside in fly over states like Idaho.