Jan Gies; Smuggled Food to Help Anne Frank

Jan Gies, who risked his life to smuggle food to Anne Frank and members of the Dutch underground during World War II, has died at 87.

Gies died of kidney failure Tuesday at his home in the Dutch capital, a spokeswoman for the Anne Frank Foundation, Teresien da Silva, said Wednesday.

He and his wife, Miep, gained international renown through Anne Frank’s best-selling diary of her two years in hiding under Nazi occupation.

Miep Gies had worked for the pectin trading firm owned by Anne’s father, Otto, and smuggled food to the Franks and the other Jews in the camouflaged annex above the firm where the Franks hid.

It was Jan Gies, then a municipal welfare department employee, who got the ration coupons that his wife needed to buy the extra food for the Franks and the others.

The Gieses--both Christians--also hid a Jewish man in their own home, and Jan Gies provided ration coupons to members of the underground.

“Jan was not a person to stand in the limelight, not even amidst all the publicity surrounding Anne Frank,” said a foundation statement. “He was throughout his lifetime a man of few words, but many deeds.”

The Gieses shunned publicity to avoid offending those whose efforts to save Jews and resistance fighters were not as widely recognized.

But Miep Gies did write a memoir, “Anne Frank Remembered,” published in 1987.

Otto Frank, Anne’s father, who was the only one of his family to survive the war, later lived with Jan and Miep Gies for seven years.

The Gieses were honored with many awards over the years, among them one from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem and another from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, given them in the spring of 1987 at the Holocaust Memorial Wall next to the U.N. Building in New York City.

In conjunction with the latter award, the Gieses granted an interview to The Times in which a clearly uncomfortable Jan Gies muttered under his breath: “We are not heroes . . . we only did our duty to help people who were in danger.”

Besides his wife, Gies is survived by a son and three grandchildren.