(Click on her name to read NYT article.)
15 February 1909 - 11 January 2010
For more than 20 consecutive years, I taught English Language Arts in a junior high school. Every year, my students read the play based on Anne Frank's diary. Considering I
may have had as many as five classes during the day, I must have read the the closing lines of the play well over a hundred times along with students. Every time it became more and more real to me, and more difficult to keep my composure. The more I read the play and discussed it with classes, the more I realized how many similar stories we would never know. First I honor and thank the darling, vibrant Anne who wrote so faithfully in her diary and the family and friends who populated the pages of that diary and the famous Annex in Amsterdam. But today, especially, I honor and thank, along with people all over the world, Miep Gies. She not only helped the Frank family and friends survive their ordeal for over two years, but she gathered up the strewn pages of a young girl's dreams, hopes, and wise insights after all were arrested. Later she presented it to Otto Frank as "Anne's legacy." Indeed, it has been a priceless legacy to the free world. Surely, Miep served as an inspiration for Anne's words:
"Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart."
