While of course, if someone lives to be 100 you can look and say that she's had a good life, even a remarkable one, there are some deaths that require more honor, more notice perhaps than others. Not to get into a philosophical discussion about how one person is more important than another - in fact, the individual lived a life that argued against that - but I don't want this day to pass without talking about Miep Gies.

Miep Gies in brief was the woman who helped hide Anne Frank and the woman who saved, and hid, Anne's diary, giving it to her father, Otto, who survived the camps. Anne and her sister, as most of us probably know, died of typhus only weeks before Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated at the end of World War II.

The Vienna-born woman who worked as a secretary for Otto Frank. She'd left Austria and had moved to the Netherlands to escape food shortages at home. She avoided deportation after refusing to join a Nazi organization by marrying, Jan Gies. Jan, it should be noted, was also instrumental in the Dutch Resistance.

To this day, it is not known who betrayed the Jews hiding in the annex of the warehouse where they survived for two years, as Miep, Jan and others worked to feed and care for them, providing food, books and more. Miep Gies spent the rest of her long life working for causes of tolerance and against the Holocaust deniers.

Gies never called herself a hero and argued that indeed she was not. She pointed to the work of people like Jan Gies who worked quietly and tirelessly but who did not receive the fame, the acknowledgement that she did, almost by accident.

In the Washington Post article on this amazing woman, it's heart-breakingly beautiful to note a couple things. One is her tremendous humility, her insistence that what she did was ordinary, commonplace, saying in 1997 in a chat with teenagers:
"Imagine young people would grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty. I am afraid nobody would ever help other people, because who is a hero? I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary." She argued repeatedly that she did not deserve the accolades as so many had done so much more than she did. But an act of bravery and of simple courtesy made her famous.

The second thing to note. Gies never opened the diary nor read the papers she collected after the Nazis took everyone away. According to the Post article she argued that even a teenager's privacy was sacred.
I've written here before about my admiration, even awe, for the "Righteous Gentiles" who risked their own lives, every day, to save another - sometimes a friend, sometimes a stranger. Gies of course was honored as a Righteous Gentile at Yad Vashem, along with her husband, in 1972.

Let us all remember. As a non-religious person, I would be a hypocrite to say I will pray for this hero, but I still might light a candle.

And do you ask yourself, as i always do, "what would I have done?" I wonder if I would have had the courage. I'd like to think so but I wonder.