Miep Gies was an employee of Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, and helped the family hide from the Nazi troops. I don’t really have the words for it, but my friend Amy does. Go on over there and check it out.
In the interim, I know a lot of my readers are my age. Encourage your parents, Grandparents and extended family to give you their testimonies. The Shoah project is really important. I know we have video of my Grandfather. My Uncle Herbie submitted a few of us Wilzigs to the database at Yad Vashem. The Germans kept meticulous records though. This is one of the many pages of my family. I have stories about many of them, many stories were never told.
Every Wilzig was my relative. It was a small family, and it’s smaller now. There are 15 pages of just us and synonymous spellings.
If you go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC there is a picture of the ship Rosa Wilzig took to the US. Unfortunately it was turned away as the US was not accepting immigrants. You see here how that story ends.
I’m the luckiest woman in the world, simply because I was born on US soil.
If you’re like me, and there’s still a family to talk to, ask the hard questions now, because the heroes like Miep Gies won’t be here forever.
Thanks for the link love, Jessica, and for sharing in honoring this amazing woman. I second your plea to all those who are fortunate enough to still have survivors who are alive to tell their stories. It would be a crime to miss the opportunity to document these stories.
The most important work project that I ever been a part of was the groundbreaking video for The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. There is nothing quite like hearing these stories first-hand, and the days for being able to do that are dwindling.
I join Jessica in taking this opportunity to remind us all to never forget.
What a great post and a great reminder of how important it is to remember the past, especially in a world like today where history seems to get rewritten all the time. It won’t be much longer before we do not have any first hand accounts just what history has recorded.