Miep and the Most Famous Diary by Meeg Pincus

Images of Anne surround her as she recalls her young friend’s life and determines to read what her diary has left to the world. On the following two-page spread, Gies is seated at her desk with the diary but she has lifted her hand from the text. After Gies presents Anne’s diary to her father, he urges her to read it, but Gies refuses: “But, even as Anne’s book is published worldwide, Miep still cannot bear to read it.” The picture shows Gies’s hand spread over a page of the open book she covers Anne’s words, but her fingertips only touch the edge of a small photo of Anne, leaving it visible to readers. The whole book has a cinematic pace to tell the story of Gies’s life, narrating each moment with deep emotion, and even employing sound effects to highlight particular events. Solano’s pictures combine the spare precision of buildings and rooms as clear as a trompe l’oeil painting, with facial expressions as evocative as a silent film.

Pincus describes Gies’s terror using a hierarchy of events and emotions: “Worse than the World War II bomber planes buzzing over Amsterdam…worst-ever sound, on this, Miep’s worst-ever day.” Children who have never experienced fear of this magnitude will still relate to the sense of dread, as all Gies’s carefully planned efforts to shelter her friends collapse around her. Readers immediately enter the story as if it were a normal family album, only to begin with a picture of Miep Gies closing her eyes in fear as she listens to the sound of soldiers’ footsteps mounting the stairs to the Secret Annex. The book’s front endpaper features photographs of Anne and her Dutch helpers mounted on the plaid background of Anne’s diary cover. Their book shows the cruel abandonment of morals and humanity which reduced Anne to living her life in fear - and Gies’s unwavering commitment to defying that reality. Pincus and Solano portray Gies as she herself did - a person for whom the moral choice was the most natural one regardless of the dangers it entailed. Miep and the Most Famous Diary chronicles the extraordinary courage of Miep Gies, the young woman whose tireless efforts on behalf of Anne ultimately could not save her. For two years, several employees of Otto Frank’s business chose to hide his family from arrest in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Anne Frank’s tragically brief life has become inextricably tied to the memory of her Dutch protectors.

Miep and the Most Famous Diary by Meeg Pincus