When the Gestapo arrested Frank’s family and 4 others who had been hidden from the Nazis in a secret room, Miep Gies kept Anne Frank’s diary safe until Otto Frank returned after the war.
The girl had chronicled two years of the emotions and fears that gripped her during hiding, as well as candid thoughts on her family, her feelings for friend-in-hiding Peter van Pels, and dreams of being a professional writer. Mixed into the entries were the names of the Dutch helpers, who risked their lives to keep the family’s secret.
“I didn’t read Anne’s diary papers. … It’s a good thing I didn’t because if I had read them I would have had to burn them,” she said in the 1998 interview. “Some of the information in them was dangerous.”