Woman who helped hide Anne Frank dies

? Miep Gies, the office secretary who defied the Nazi occupiers to hide Anne Frank and her family for two years and saved the teenager’s diary, has died, the Anne Frank Museum said today. She was 100.

Gies’ Web site reported she died Monday after a brief illness.

Gies was the last of the few non-Jews who supplied food, books and good cheer to the secret annex behind the canal warehouse where Anne, her parents, sister and four other Jews hid for 25 months during World War II.

After the apartment was raided by German police, Gies gathered Anne’s scattered notebooks and papers and locked them in a drawer for her return after the war. The diary, which Anne Frank was given on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life in hiding from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944.

Anne died of typhus at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, two weeks before the camp was liberated. Gies gave the diary to Anne’s father, Otto, the family’s only survivor, who published it in 1947.