The Hardest Part of Hiding a Family Was the Groceries

Miep Gies had eight extra mouths to feed and a grocery budget that couldn't show it.

Amsterdam, summer 1942. Food was rationed by coupon, and every shopkeeper knew roughly what a household of two should buy. Miep was a secretary at Otto Frank's spice and pectin company on the Prinsengracht. Behind a swinging bookcase upstairs, eight people were hiding: the four Franks, the three van Pelses and a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer. They needed bread, vegetables and milk every day for about 760 days.

So she spread the shopping around, used more than one store and never bought so much that a clerk would raise an eyebrow. The ration cards came through resistance contacts, which meant one more person who knew. And every person who knew was one more person who could talk.

That's the part the movies skip. Hiding a family wasn't one brave night. It was a logistics problem with a firing squad at the end of it, and you had to solve it again every morning.

The standard the record sets

The title "Righteous Among the Nations" comes from Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial authority, under a 1953 Israeli law. The bar is high. The rescuer has to be a non-Jew who risked life, liberty or position to save Jews. They can't have asked for payment or reward. And it has to be documented, usually through testimony from the people who were saved.

More than 28,000 people have been recognized. Poland has the most of any country, with the Netherlands next. Yad Vashem itself treats that number as a floor. Plenty of rescuers died with their secret, and plenty of survivors never learned the name of the person who opened a door.

The price in Poland

In occupied Poland the stakes were written into German law. A decree in October 1941 made helping Jews a death-penalty offense.

In the village of Markowa, in southeastern Poland, Józef and Wiktoria Ulma were farmers. Józef was a beekeeper and an amateur photographer, and the family had six small children. They hid eight Jews from neighboring families on the farm, the Goldmans, the Grünfelds and the Didners.

Someone betrayed them. On March 24, 1944, German police came to the farm. They shot the eight Jews first. Then they shot Józef and Wiktoria, who was pregnant with a seventh child. Then they shot the children. The oldest was eight. The youngest wasn't yet two.

The Ulmas aren't a story with a rescue at the end. Nobody got out. But the record is clear about what they chose, and the Ulmas knew the law.

Ordinary jobs, extraordinary use

Most rescuers weren't soldiers. They had jobs that happened to put them in the right place.

Irena Sendler was a Warsaw social worker. Because the Germans feared typhus spreading out of the ghetto, she held a pass to enter it for sanitary inspections. She used it to carry children out. The commonly cited estimate is about 2,500 children, placed with families and convents under new names. Some of the more dramatic details of her legend have been disputed by historians. The core isn't in dispute. The Gestapo arrested her in October 1943, and she was beaten badly enough to break her legs and feet. The underground group she worked with, Żegota, bribed a guard and got her out. She was listed as executed. She lived until 2008, age 98.

Corrie ten Boom was a watchmaker in Haarlem, the Netherlands. Her family's home above the shop had a hidden room built into her bedroom, behind a false wall. The Dutch resistance helped build it. On February 28, 1944, after an informant's tip, the Gestapo raided the house. They arrested the family. Six people hiding in the wall weren't found, and they stayed in there for about two days until the resistance got them out. Corrie's father Casper died within ten days of his arrest. Her sister Betsie died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in December 1944. Corrie was released that same month, owing to what she was told was a clerical error.

None of these people were trained for this. A secretary, a farmer, a social worker and a watchmaker. That's the whole point.

The part that's hard to say

Honest history means saying what the rescuers were up against, and some of it was their own neighbors.

Most people in occupied Europe did nothing. Some informed. The Franks' hiding place was betrayed, and nobody has ever proved by whom. Many rescuers were poor, and a number of them took money for hiding people. Yad Vashem's standard excludes those who did, and that's a high bar. Plenty who took money still risked the same death.

After the war, some rescuers were shunned by their own communities for what they'd done. Some stayed quiet for decades. Some survivors spent years looking for the people who saved them. A few never found them.

And the stories of the saved don't all end well. When the Annex was raided on August 4, 1944, Miep wasn't arrested. The Austrian officer in charge, who she knew was from Vienna as she was, let her go. Two of the other helpers, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman, were taken to camps and survived. Of the eight in hiding, only Otto Frank lived.

What was in the drawer

Miep went up to the empty Annex after the raid. The floor was scattered with papers and notebooks. She gathered them up, along with a red-checked diary, and locked them in a desk drawer.

She didn't read them. In July 1945 it was confirmed that Anne was dead. Miep handed the whole bundle to Otto Frank.

She said later that if she'd read it, she would have burned it. The diary named the helpers. Anyone who found it would have known exactly who to arrest.

She kept the drawer shut, and that's how a girl's voice survived.

If you want more on people who showed what the record calls courage, read The Medal of Honor Men You Should Be Able to Name. For another group of ordinary people who put it all down on paper, there's The Pioneer Women Who Wrote It All Down. And for the quiet work that holds things together, try The Men Who Built Your Ordinary Tuesday.