Anne Frank guardian celebrates turning 100

Miep Gies, who looked after Anne Frank and her family as they hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War Two, has turned 100 years old.

Mrs Miep Gies - Anne Frank guardian celebrates turning 100
Mrs Miep Gies, seen here in 1995, has just celebrated her one hundredth birthday Credit: Photo: AP

She celebrated her milestone quietly in Friesland with her friends and family.

Mrs Gies talked about the day Nazis broke into the Franks' hiding place in Amsterdam, tipped off by a still unknown collaborator, and marched the Franks out of the building along the Princengracht and off to a miserable, lonely death in the Nazi termination camps.

"I'll never forget it, the feeling of sorrow and devastation when I looked around the empty rooms which had been home to the Franks, my friends, for nearly two years," she said.

In Anne's small room, preserved in Amsterdam's Anne Frank Museum, Mrs Gies found the teenager's diary and kept it in case the family survived. Only Otto Frank, Anne's father, survived the death camps.

She gave the diary to him on his return to Amsterdam. The Anne Frank diary records Anne's transition into a teenager, the day to day events in the claustrophobic Achterhuis, where the Franks lived, and her hopes for a future as a writer at the end of the war.

The Diary of Anne Frank has been translated into 55 languages and has sold more than 20 million copies.

Miep Gies was in her early thirties and working as a secretary for the well-to-do Otto Frank at his import export office along Amsterdam's Princengracht when he asked her for help. She was the first to be told about his decision to move his family from their comfortable apartment in the well-to-do south of the city into a small hiding place known as the Achterhuis (home behind) adjacent to his office.

Many old Amsterdam canal houses have a small Achterhuis and Anne's father was counting on the Germans, who had occupied the city and were relentlessly rounding up Jews, not being aware of the secret buildings.

Mrs Gies immediately agreed to be the family's go-between with a group of others. She is now the only surviving member of the team which kept the Franks alive for two years from 1942 until their capture in 1944.

She gathered food and clothing coupons, delivering supplies to the family in their hiding place and risking her own life.

"Anne was a lovely, lively, normal young girl. She was so full of the joy of just being alive. She looked forward to resuming her own life, going back to school, travelling abroad and becoming a writer after the war. She never doubted she and her family would survive."

Miep Gies risked her life looking after the Franks but said: "I stand at the end of a long line of brave Dutch people who did much more than I did to save lives during the dark terrible years of the occupation of the Netherlands by the Germans. For them, the events of those terrible years remain alive like something that happened yesterday. For me, I think of what happened to the Franks every day."