Miep Gies overleden

Yesterday Miep Gies died. She would have turned 101 years old next month. Gies was the last surviving member of the group that helped Anne Frank, her family and the other four onderduikers.

I visited the Anne Frank huis in Amsterdam on May 17, 2000. The concentration camp in which Anne and Margot Frank died in March 1945, is quite close to AndrĂ©’s parents place; we visited Bergen-Belsen in December 2007 and passed it on our bike trip last summer. Today, none of the original buildings of the concentration camps remain, but the train station is still there, and a white line along the side of the road marks where the prisoners were forced to to walk from the train to the concentration camp.