Miep Gies

Hermine Santruschitz was born in Vienna and was so malnourished after the First World War that at eleven she was sent on a relief scheme to the Netherlands, where a working-class Dutch family took her in and kept her. They called her Miep. In 1933 she went to work for Otto Frank's small spice and pectin business in Amsterdam.

In July 1942, when the Franks went into hiding in the rooms behind the office, Otto asked her if she would help. She said yes at once, without asking what it involved, because, she said later, she could see he was frightened. For the next two years she and a few colleagues kept eight people alive: queuing with forged ration cards, buying vegetables from a friendly greengrocer, carrying up library books and gossip, and keeping the business running downstairs as cover. She and her husband Jan also hid a Dutch student in their own flat.

On 4 August 1944 the police came. Miep was spared arrest, possibly because the officer in charge was, like her, from Vienna. When the building was quiet she went up to the annexe and gathered Anne's diary and loose pages from the floor, locking them in her desk unread. She intended to give them back to Anne.

Only Otto returned. In 1947 she handed him the papers. She spent the rest of her long life answering letters about the diary, insisting she had done nothing special. She died in 2010, a month short of her 101st birthday.