Miep and the Most Famous Diary by Meeg Pincus, illustrated by Jordi Solano, Sleeping Bear Press (c) 2019, ISBN 9791534-11-0250, 40 pages, for children 6-10; $17.99.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — The story of the woman who hid Anne Frank and her family focuses on the time immediately after the Franks were dragged away from their secret annex in Amsterdam, Holland — three of them to die in Nazi concentration camps and only one, the father Otto, to survive.
In this story, which author Meeg Pincus of Carlsbad based on Miep Gies’s autobiography, we see a Nazi storm trooper threatening to arrest Miep too, but relenting after he learns that she, like he, came originally from Vienna, Austria.
Paralyzed with fear, she realizes that if anything owned by the Franks’ family is to be rescued, she must do it before Nazi moving vans arrive to loot all their property. She runs up to the secret annex and grabs a combing shawl and the diary in which Anne had been confiding her thoughts for nearly three years.
She shoves both items into a drawer of her desk, hoping she will be able to present the diary, unread, back to Anne on her return. However, the war ends, and neither Anne, nor her sister, nor her mother returns. Otto, who had been Miep’s employer, does return however, and after learning that his daughters had died, Miep retrieved the diary and gave it to Otto. Reding it, he was amazed at the depth of thought of his little girl.
After he agreed to publish it, the book became an international best seller and Anne became the symbol of the innocent lives murdered by the Nazis. One day, sitting alone in a quiet room, Miep finally read the diary which she had rescued, ultimately to the world’s benefit.
Had Miep not climbed the stairs to the annex in the hours between the Franks’ arrest and the arrival of the moving van, Anne and her legacy would have been unknown to the world.
In addition to the beloved story of Anne and Miep — and the friendship that is possible between people of good will — I was impressed with Jordi Solano’s depiction of the Nazis. In my mind, and in most people’s I believe, they are pictured as snarling beasts of men, barely recognizable as fellow human beings.
However, Solano depicts them as quite ordinary looking people, fellow humans whom you would not bother to look at twice if they had not been given swastika armbands, symbolizing their power of life and death over the innocent.
The more I reflected on Solano’s drawings, the more I appreciated them. Most Nazis weren’t “supermen,” as their propagandists would have you believe. They were pathetic little human beings hypnotized by hatred and propaganda into acting in a very un-human fashion.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com